Poem for the day:- A Singular view of dualism

Upon a Sunlit hill I spied
A clock of stone where shadows lied
And cast the hands of Time unbidden
While inside many times were hidden
As many whens as many wheres
There animated Selves in pairs
Conjoined inside a walnut shell
Triune to render heav'n or hell
As Adam points to God appealing
Highest on the chapel ceiling
Asleep, awake in nights and days
While all around the theatre plays
Projections from the scenes inside
Reflections that the starry-eyed
So dream the world must come to be
As Leonardo's symmetry
Thus sum to nought with nothing left
And hunt the matter dark bereft
For balance in a moving scale
And seeking nothing find the veil
Of tears that binds the mind distraught
Across the river styx to nought

Yet from a circle to a line
Of thought is broken faith divine
Or as the telescope extended
Views but circles eyes pretended
Linear the God empirical
Sees but self's projected miracle
As Wigner in his very pomp
Was led the very merry romp
By Maths, that property of light
Itself can't see with second sight
And draws a circle black and pleasant
Where light is past but never present
Or as philosopher in words
Forgets the folding page absurds
And origami sums reverse
Blind calculating universe

But see through spectacles of Venn
Cross-referencing the now and then
Within the circle spacetime wrought
From something never back to nought
And Physics ends as Man begun
Binocular, as two in one.

Capital Controls Poem for the day. Part the Second. Tails

Centrally planned haircuts look immediately awful. Free market haircuts, a decade later. It is difficult to imagine the propaganda required to make millions of people pull their own eyebrows out, only to draw them back on with a pencil you've sold them. Some industries lend themselves to central planning, and -

REJ:- Just get on with it -

Idrisyesthatone:-

He slept upon the mountain ill
Descending curse of Cader
As Poet or insane to nil
Subtractor and the adder

And landing tails the other side
In fear and trembling frit
With hollow soul and windows wide
Saw more and less of it:-
The history of money wouldn't
Change a single bit
If every cent and dollar
Had been wholly counterfeit!

So money-less the New World spun
With distribution planned
Thus ended finance flying fun
On rocketships unmanned

And electronic sharing bits
Or paper, as to fashion
As each another's picture fits
To each received their ration

And all agreed, from money freed
Before had been much sillier
And all pretended not to see
Their rations looked familiar

The simple things were simply done
And all were fed and housed
And when the bell for work was rung
The world slept unaroused

Up shot the few, whose hearts were true
With love for man inspired
The resting market-forceless crew
Some other force required
And this the baser angels
Of our nature much desired

The prophets of the present, past
And future age be damned
When humans don't behave quite as
Projected projects planned.

REJ:- Da iawn Idris! Two out of two. Both wrong -

Idrisyesthatone:- Perhaps wait for 'edge' -

REJ:- Sioned says you're not allowed in when you've been 'expressing your liquidity preference'...

Capital Controls Pome for the day, Part the first.

The desert of Nevada bloomed on the back of broken dreams, paid for by the millions who lost. But a gambler can only lose, if the house wins. Overall, nothing can be lost.

In 2008, a rather larger gamble went wrong, and nothing was lost. In fact, so much nothing was lost, we're still paying for it now.

In every nation, freedom, democracy, autonomy - Sovereignty - lies, in like proportion, in the hands of those with the greater number of sovereigns. Thus the market force with which one may summon a waiter who despises -

REJ:- Waiter minute! That's not a pome! -

Idrisyesthatone:- *sigh* -

A madman came down from the hill
To say what he could see
He saw a coin toss land on edge
Between the binary

Now first he's going to call it heads
- You see the coin's still spinning -
And then it's tails, and then it's edge
With everybody winning

So all the money in the world
Was placed upon a rocket
And shot to space, the human race
Thus poundless in its pocket

It then appeared, not quite as feared
That nought was lost in wealth
The only cost, the rocket lost
And launcher's mental health

Upon the marble rolling straight
Around the curving sky
Was everything there was before
And humans wondered why

They scratched their heads, and each alone
Declared that wealth must plummet
Then scratched their heads together
At an 'International Summit'

The sane ones found, by common ground
A sense of deep unease
So printed pretty pictures
On some slices of some trees

And having learned their lesson
Launched their currency again
Put half upon the rocket -
Half to leave, and half remain

What left was burnt to nothing
What was left worth twice the same
It seemed quite difficult to lose
One's money in this game

How stupid are the tiny ants
Viewed economically
Twas almost as if peer review
Were circularity

And if you think you've seen a flaw
One must admit you're right:-
There's no need for the rocket or
The madman's second sight
Just look around the world and see
The capital aflight.

REJ:- I hope tails is better.

Poem for the day

One meets so few genuine solipsist plagiarists. But what we need now, more than ever, is strongandstable poetry. Malheureusement, there is no border at the mind where le pen is flightier than the horde. What better way to elucidate than to recreate the unsuccessful mating of minds that was Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, in the form of a silky Afghan, and a German Shepherd, trapped in iambic tetrameter. 

Wel, I can think of three better ways, perhaps three and a quarter. Apart from that, I've lost it. So have this instead.


Every pencil writes in stencil
One without and one within
O! How anyone can see
The letter O is circles three
And inbetween, the line inside
The universe, a circle ride.

Poem for the day

Shoe-saving string theorist Stephen Hawking is not fit to tie my laces, but is right to warn about the dangers of AI. A rogue cyborg seizing power could be disastrous for the world, but any programming errors would be easy to spot in the malfunctioning language, and other giveaways such as unconvincing skin and hair. I was saying this to my cat last night when Dr. Bendi the fifth and final let himself in with a key made of ice - more hygienic, but the lock rusts - and started waggling and buzzing, claiming to be a zzzzzom-bee. I don't know about you, but I always find zzzzzom-bee charades boring. The answer's always flower, but you have to go the distance. And the direction. Easy puzzles for a Sun reader. Then he insisted a dog was really a record player. A speaker, a listener and His Master's Voice. the feedback loop, DOG. 'Bees dead, dogs alive' he said. I counted 12 times. 'One mirror good, two mirrors better'. Wel, I think we know who's barking. 'Self-reflection!' he howled.

The night degenerated - if you can believe it - into an argument over how to spell somniloquent. 'It's got an I in it' I said, having googled it 5 minutes ago. 'There's no I in it, that's the whole point!' he buzz-barked back, quite animated. And this explains his unorthodox spelling:-

Somneloquent bees
That read from the flower
Pray tell by the Sun
Whence the source of thy power

Cross-pollinate minds
With hexagonal money
And melt wax the humans
From nectar to honey

Phantom poem for the day

They say in Abati cwm-hir that each man is born with a spade to bury his father. They say in Cnwch-y-craig that each man is born with a hoe to plough his mother. And they say in Llanfihangel-y-creuddyn that each man is a digestive tube with a lightbulb for a head. That's why I don't go out much. But Idris does, it's just a shame he comes back in. Donne's muse trotted on a dromedary. Wordsworth was the pointing on other's brickwork. And Shelley's bird did not soar too high. But Idris has a stop-go animated virtual muse he's rather wedded to, and insists that two heads are better than one, evolutionarily speaking. Wel, I'm in two minds about that, but Idris seems certain...

Phantom limb, phantom pain,
Phantom phantom in the brain,
Two at once the conscious seed,
One to write, and one to read.

2016:- The gift that keeps on giving

What a year! And still time for Cliff! But Someone doesn't seem to want him. The list of vacuous narcissists of no to negative consequence just keeps on growing - it is the gift that keeps on giving. David Bowie gave us permission to be ourselves. Leonard Cohen gave us permission to be our big-nosed sulky selves. And George Michael attempted to reinvent the drive-thru. Each time, the world changed and would never be the same again. Although you can watch them on youtube when they were better. But who would you most like to see die next? Yes - it's your friends and colleagues who have suddenly become 5 yrs old, and that twat on the news who never knew fucknobody. But apart from them? Which celebrity would you most like to see next shuffling off into a hastily cobbled together crockofshite TV #tweet fest? Everyone will have their own personal favourite 'Top Ten', but I'll probably get bored halfway through....

1. That other one out of Status Quo.

Really, that other one out of Status Quo is not the only other one out of Status Quo, but with the B-listers dropping like flies, and the rest of the alphabet dying at over a million a week, there just aren't enough candles for everybody. Sneering snobs have attempted to diminish the musical achievements of this seminal band, but if it really were that easy to make a multitude of hit records sound the same, then every one would be it. Apart from that first one, which instead merely sounded like someone else.

2. Bob Geldof

A popular choice with tax and planning authorities everywhere, Bob's greatest achievements must surely include forgetting Midge Ure, and making Nigel Farage look the lesser wanker. His famously inspired ad lib 'Give us your fucking money' was in fact rehearsed over many years, but such was his professional delivery that even today it seems off the cuff, and people don't always appreciate the years of practise that go into every act behind the scenes.

3. Bob Monkhouse again

Shrewd observers of Bob Monkhouse will have noticed that he was never truly alive, merely a stacked nesting of fabricated GOSUB routines, all written out and colour coded in that famous book of him, but it was still fun to hear that he had died, albeit sadly only in 2003. Perhaps his greatest joke was the one about faking sincerity, but no it wasn't - that was merely a sinister confession. It was instead 'They laughed when I said I was going to be a comedian. They're not laughing now'. Although we can still say this without his actual physical presence, it still somehow seems a shame he can't die again.

4. Terry Wogan again, twice, to be sure, to be sure

You wouldn't think someone would steal money from Children in Need, but then you are not a sadly missed celebrity, and so can't spell steal 'small non-commercial fee'. It takes a consummate mastery of presentation to be able to do this while simultaneously reading off the autocue just how many lives this money would otherwise save - every little helps - and of course Terry 'would gladly have done it for nothing' if the freedom of information request had forced him to a quarter of a century earlier.

5. Simon Cowell

Even the most leathery cynic amongst us will feel it a tragedy that Simon's mother never lived to see him die. Very much an outward-looking man, Simon invented the talent show, the talent show, and the talent show, and who knows what he might invent next - there seems no start to his ability. Although already immortalised in dentistry, the flesh remains weak, and though these records will outlast him, one just can't help hoping he takes forever to die, a hollow, empty husk of a human, gazing at the reflection that must be so transparent to himself, watching his life slowly evaporate, all the time acutely, exquisitely, horrifically aware of the impending eternal vacuum he never really left.