Three Poems

Hello friends,

Three poems this week, including a new one (yet to be tweeted).

There will be no newsletter next week, but I’ll be back on January 1st. So, a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!

Anyway,,, enjoy! (And if you do, please consider purchasing The Robots of Babylon — your support would mean a lot to me.)

INTERSTELLAR WILD (Anagrammed Lines)

We speak of the interstellar wild
like we aren’t part of it. She dwells
in we who still sparkle — a fettered,
skeletal star. We flow in her tepid
earth, like weeds, patterns of will
personified. We talk, shatter well —
written like Death’s pale flowers. 

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INTERSTELLAR WILD (Homovocalism*)

We speak of the interstellar wild:
These hallowed sidereal lights
seem alone in the clearing.
Gentle and obedient, each glint’s
eternal glow belies the raging —
where black holes dispel the starlight,
deep and covert in the lethal night.

(*The lines use the same vowels, in the same order)

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Now, a new poem (which, confusingly, doesn’t appear in The Robots of Babylon). The poem is a sonnet in anapaestic tetrameter, in which every stressed syllable of the anapaest must alliterate according to the decimal expansion of √2 (1.414213562373095):

ATTACK OF THE ROBOTS OF BABYLON
1414213562373095

The Robots of Babylon break through a buttress
and batter a fortress, with gluttonous gladness.
A guard finds his gauntlet and clutches his cutlass,
as tendrils of metal emerge from the madness.

Outside in the city, a silicon sentry
besieges a ziggurat, zapping the zealots —
observing no zestful resistance from gentry
or jesters; no hindrance from heroes or helots.

And, marching among all the mayhem and mist,
a monstrous armada of mechanised gods
regathers the gore, in a terrible tool....

In time, their metallic interiors twist
to tendons and tissues; their tubular rods
to rubbery rinds — and their riots to rule.