Poem/Spooks In The Machine

Warning the First: This is what happens when I read about Twitter coverage of the Iranian election and start thinking about Little Brother, Serenity, The Gone-Away World and The X-Files in confluence. (With apologies to Cory Doctorow, Joss Whedon, Nick Harkaway and Chris Carter.)

Warning the Second: I am a giant geek.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin.

 

spooks in the machine

 

& in my head I hear them shouting –

Take it back! wrote Doctorow; & as the smoke

of bloody bombs and tiger-fires lights the way,

young fingers dance a typeset revolution, row on row, and say! –  

don’t updates sound like Mr Universe? You cannot stop the signal. 

True. Technology’s an everloving curse.

 

The youth are fighting back. From pens & swords

we battle guns & tweets; and shockingly the old wives’ mandate 

(tell it to the bees) has proven true:

the hivemind waits, a hydra craving news.

The truth is out there. All along the pipe of pipes,

we raise a cry: the The FOX is going up! 

& when we look and look again

there is no lie, no crawling, poor excuse to tell

that begs our ignorance of broken men,

the brimstone-charred apologists of hell.

 

Words thrive in spaces other norms refuse: they

grow like ivy, breed like mushrooms, eat the smart refuse

of dreams, & when the firewalls are trashed 

they revel in it: long live youth! whose busy thumbs in World War III

(should trenches ever come again, & schnapps, & soccer skirting bombs)

might save the Christmas Truce!

Hurdle The Last (I Hope)

So, I’ve been quiet of late. My last three uni assignments have been written and handed in, my second visa application has been posted off in the special ultra-expensive platinum courier express shinybag demanded by the British Consulate, and I am back to something which vaguely resembles a normal working week after a fortnight of random illness. But before I lie, shipwrecked and comatose on the shores of Guiltless Free Time, there is one last hurdle: a sit-down exam on Thursday. As per Nigel Havers in Chariots of Fire, I’m of half a mind to add a brimming glass of perilously balanced champagne to the mixture, just to make things interesting.

Or then again, maybe not.