Hello friends,
It’s just five days now until the publication of THE ROBOTS OF BABYLON, my new collection of constrained, formal poetry. It’s a book full of newly invented constraints, old constraints, and variations on traditional forms — a 104-page, full-colour hardback or paperback, currently pre-orderable from both PenteractPress.com and AnthonyEtherin.com. Please consider picking up a copy!
Four poems this week — enjoy!
PATHOS AND ETHOS (Palindrome)
Emit fog, no sadness.
Oh, taper upwards!
Oh, tell all, ethos!
Draw pure pathos!
Send a song of time.PREDESTINATION (Anagrammed Lines)
Predestination:
I reopen distant
repetitions and
end points — a rite
dies in a portent.
WHAT MAKES US (Palindrome)
A mar on a past is us.
Time total,
life vital,
error relative,
fill a totem —
It’s us.
It’s a panorama.THE ARROW OF TIME (Sonnet)
Entropic stock can’t drop in closed domains,
and rises by a logarithmic rule
dependent on the macro-system’s gains
in micro-states (which likewise cannot fall).
And so, time’s arrow points a certain way:
As cosmic entropy — disorder — grows,
we feel the future seize the present day
(and this because the universe is closed).
But there’s a psychic analogue, we find:
the rate at which the present instant dies
increases with the stimuli the mind
assimilates: With joy, the moment flies;
with poetry and wine, one’s life is shrunk;
and yet, said Baudelaire, one must get drunk....