Auto Semiotic Asphyxiation

 

I’m frightened

Like a banana

Looking at a Twix

“What’s this?”

A banana

Afraid that its sleek yellow curves won’t be enough

Not against this golden beast

Afraid that the precise, firm, concave sweep of its fruity surface

Will fail to entice

When opposed to the sugar rush immediacy 

Of not one

But two

Caramel biscuits

God damn that Twix!

I’m scared

Like a dinosaur

Looking up to see a meteor

That’s going to throw the ground into the sky

I’m apprehensive

Like it’s 1999

And I’ve just registered a website

For my business selling fax machines

I’m worried

Like the town crier announcing the birth

Of the printing press

What’s happening is this:

I’m typing a poem

And the software predicts 

The next word

Correctly

How can artificial intelligence know who a poet thinks?

If it can, how long before my kind become…

No. I wasn’t going to type ‘extinct’. 

Maybe I wasn’t going to rhyme at all

You don’t know me

You system

You machine

You don’t feel 

You don’t desire

You don’t dream

But I confess

If the words I choose are something a computer can guess

Maybe I’m not the wild eccentric I imagine in my head

If a plastic intelligence can pre-empt my so called eloquence

Then it’s me that needs to change

I’ve got stuck in this here lane

And actually, this is brilliant, I reckon

I should thank the simulation for bringing this to my attention 

I have to try harder

To be a smarter banana

This diplodocus is going to survive the encroaching disaster

I’ll defeat you, you Twix, 

Yeah, you in your wrapper

All tempting and dapper

Don’t feel bad, you meteor

You’re nothing but a metaphor

For the death of art brought about

Not by technology

But by metaphysical complacency

And a slavish adherence to the form of poetry over its

True, joyful purpose

Which is to disrupt and be improbable

Let me go back to the beginning of this parable

And stick things in you won’t auto predict

Banana skins to make you slip

Dinosaurs to make me smile

Fax machines, because half my audience won’t get the joke

Town criers because I’ll keep calling out, 

Proclaim the news in the town square

A thing of beauty makes no sense

You can’t predict it

Only know it

When you see it standing there

Like a banana

Finding Ways To Be Alone

 

Peter sits nursing a cup of tea and an almond slice

Going through arguments he should have won in 1996

He used to come here, back then,

More often

With more hope, and more hair

And a girl with whom he tried, quite hard

To fall in love

But who proved resistant to his ways

You can’t smoke in here any more

The ghosts of cigarettes linger amid

The smell of frying bacon and floor cleaner

It’s unlikely anyone ever successfully fell in love

In here

Or - at least - no two people fell in love with each other

200 miles away, Sarah signals the barman and

Orders another couple of beers

Puts her left hand in her pocket to best conceal 

Her wedding ring

It isn’t a conscious thing

Part of her just knows the way this conversation’s going

She can tell from the smoke that a fire is coming

The sun is doing afternoon stuff through the window

Gold on the wood panels and through the dust motes

She laughs a little too hard at the tall guy’s bad joke

And feels the bite of the cold beer

And she’s not thought of that cafe in years

But for a second, the daytime disappears

And she hears the ghost of a Britpop song

Over tinny cafe speakers

And feels the distance tug inside

And tastes, for a second, the bitter tang Of lukewarm tea and an almond slice

Starfish

 

Heavy rain attacks the roof above me

Its weight and relentless strength lending it

A deep, bass thrum

A warm surround sound

I am drifting to sleep in the top room of the house

You are downstairs in the bedroom

With the kind of cough that would spell certain death

In a Victorian novel

Or literally any TV movie

Books look down at me from dark shelves

Their spines an amber ripple in a sliver of streetlight

From where the curtains don’t quite meet

They regard me, as if wondering what I’m doing

Here, at night

I’m a day visitor, surely?

An occasional friend who strokes their warm, sunlit spines

Pretending I might, one day, read them all

Despite having read precisely nine books in the whole of last year

Three of which were about Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I love the rain, though

Pounding sound through the ceiling above me 

And around me

Scattergun dancing across the tiles

The roar of a a displaced ocean

I’m warmer for it

Warmer than I would be on a Summer day

You cough, downstairs, through the floorboards

The gap between the cold of the rain

And the warmth of my covers

Is the gap between

The sadness that we’re apart

And the utter joy that I get to spread my arms and legs

Out like a mad starfish

A starfish

Drifting out to sea

Drifting

Stretching, further and further

Everything else goes away

But the sound of the waves

The cold and the warm

The noise of the rain

Henry the Skellington

 

Henry the Skellington was on the edge

Of an awkward conversation

With the boy from whose imagination 

His mad, luminous, bony limbs

Had sprung forth

He said to the boy, “We need to talk,”

His massive cartoon teeth clack clack clack

Together as he spoke

He said, “I’m sorry, 

But I really need to get back.

Back into the inside of your brain.

I don’t belong here in the real world.”

But the boy acted like he hadn’t heard

He just laughed at the funny skellington

That danced and dangled in the light of his 

Dinosaur shaped bedroom lamp

It was great to have a skellington

And the boy wanted it to carry on

Henry tried to frown but

Without lips it was a hopeless case

He just looked delirious with glee

Within his xylophone ribcage he felt a pang

In the gap where his heart might be

“I know you’re having fun,” said Henry

Trying, again, to make an impression

“But I’m not really sure I can maintain cohesion

Here among your mortal kind

I’m a skellington

I’m made of thoughts

I need something real to bind

My bony self together

But the boy thought, “This will last forever!

I’ve got a skellington to call my own!

He’ll come to school with me and be my friend

And no-one will be mean to me again.”

And Henry tried his best, he did,

He didn’t want to disappoint this wide eyed joyful kid

But a skellington can’t hold a dream

In it’s smooth porcelain fingers

And mad poetic thoughts rarely live beyond

The beautiful moment of their conception

And so, one evening

Henry left forever

And the boy cried

And cried

And cried

And if that makes you sad, too, 

I think I know why

We try to look like grown ups

But we’re children more than half the time

We hold our joy in fragile hands

And we’ve all got a skellington

Inside