Existence

A Question for AI

A Question for AI

It is hard
to shed the skin
and skin once shed
can never
be worn again

Yesterday
is gone
today
slips slowly by

Tomorrow
always comes
but never arrives

Who and what am I
this child
who thrives on sorrow
and on a sadness
that grinds
bones to dust
and soft silk ash

Tell me
if you know
what will arrive
for this child
tomorrow
if and when
it comes

Comment:

Moo is back painting and I am sure everybody is happy to hear that. Mind you, he’s a little bit on the Moo-dy side, if you know what I mean, as you can see from this painting. He calls it Moody Moo and he says it’s a Moo-d painting. He swears there’s a Moo Cow in it, but search as I have, I cannot see a Mrs. Moo. Let me know if you find one. Usual route – unless you have a drone of one sort or another. They have the road up leading into town and we had to wait a long time yesterday at the roadside while little men in yellow hats stood in front of the cars and wouldn’t let them move.

It was so bad, I put Pete Seeger on the disc player and turned the volume up full. “No pasarán, no pasarán, sang the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.” I thought it was rather funny. The person holding the placard that said STOP didn’t seem to be amused. I don’t if it was the volume. Maybe he spoke Spanish and knew all about the Spanish Civil War and how the Abraham Lincoln Brigade stopped Franco’s troops and wouldn’t let them pass! No pasarán, no pasarán – those yellow hatted road buccaneers certainly closed down the narrow straits that led to our house and they wouldn’t let anyone through. No pasarán, no pasarán.

Meanwhile, old Welsh logic – tomorrow never comes, because by the time it gets here, its today. “Good one,” says Moo, checking the way I have reproduced his painting. Oh yes, the original is for sale, Moo says – going cheap for a five figure sum. And that’s not counting the two zeros after the dot! I think Moo is really asking too much. OW! He just kicked me. Sorry, Moo. That’s a very fair price. Now he seems happy. But I don’t think you’ll get it. Now he seems sad – oh dear, just like I said – “Moody Moo”!

I’d better be careful, or he will be doing some Blue Moo paintings next, and he’ll be turning the air blue while he’s painting them. Meanwhile, speaking of AI – here’s the news that’s rolling round the rock at Island View. There’s a new book on the market. A limited Edition. Only 50 copies. Keep your eyes open. They will soon be a collector’s item. In fact, they already are. Go for it -Don Roger and Don Ryan. Oh yes. Moo did the cover painting for that one too. But he’s not selling it – he’s already given it away to another friend.

Obsidian’s Edge 2
An AI Analysis

Don Roger & Don Ryan

Free Spirit

Free Spirit

I stare at nothing
and nothing do I see
nothingness is the state for me

for me anonymity
no name no form
and shapeless I will be

shapeless yes hopeless no
for this I know – eternity
has sown its seeds in me

ashes to ashes dust to dust
my spirit will eternal be

my death will set it free
free to fly – free to roam
free to find my forever home

Comment:

Moo is bring stroppy. He has started painting again, but he refuses to sign his paintings. “Three little letters,” I told him. I won’t tell you what he told me to do. little bit embarrassing, and I am not that flexible in my old age.

Never mind. When nobody was looking, I promised him one of KTJ’s world famous Peanut Butter Balls. Well, they would be world famous if I let them out of my fridge in Island View, and I certainly don’t intend doing that. Then I asked him for a title and he went as crazy as Cuckoo Spit. He told me he was Going Bodmin Again, just like in Doc Martin. I told him he wasn’t in Doc Martin. “How do you know,” he asked, “you always fall asleep in front of the telly.”

He thinks he was hugging that great big squirrel, as mad as a hatter, as crazy as a loon, as loony as a man in a loony bin. So, why does a lunatic sleep under the bed. Answer – because he’s a little potty of course.

Does anybody read this junk I write? I can’t imagine that they would. However, if you are reading it, please send a recipe for maple fudge by mule train via the lower Andes. I think it is quicker than snail mail, or the dog sled via the North Pole. Every time a dog lies down for a rest, those sleds get a flat tire.

Loopy

Swings

They told me that one day
my feet would be up in the air,
and the next they would be stuck
on the ground.

A roundabout, they said,
a merry-go-round,
with all the fun of whatever fair
happens to be around that day.

Someone, not me, flicks a switch,
music plays, the carousel horses
move up and down, slowly at first,
then faster and faster as day, music,
and horses all gather pace.

There are no reins. If there were,
I would heave those horses
back towards whatever reality I left.

But what is reality now?
These hot flashes that warm my flesh?
Those cold flushes that make me shiver,
then turn up the heat
until I am sweating again?

Shadows grow. I pull less strongly
on the swing boat’s ropes.
My journey slows. The showman
raises the bar beneath the wooden hull.

Wish it or not, my time is nearly up.
With a bumpety-thump,
my journey grinds
to its inevitable end.

Comment

Moo is having a bad hair day. Somebody glued all his paint brushes together and he hasn’t painted anything for a long time. The painting above dates back to April. Oh dear. Poor Moo. I shall shed a little tear for him, when he is not looking. I wouldn’t want him to know I care, so please don’t tell him. I wish I could unclog his paint brushed for him. but I am not very good at that sort of thing. In fact, I don’t think I am particularly good at anything right now.

Everyday is an adventure now. Every day something happens. Sometimes for the better, more often for the worse. Like a knocked my morning cup of coffee over. Like I burned the toast and the fire alarm went off. Like I squeezed the orange and the juice went all over the table cloth to join the wine stains that I made when I reached for the salt and I knocked that over s well. And don’t let’s talk about filling my fountain pens and leaking ink everywhere.

So – look on the bright side of things. Every cloud has a silver lining. Hooray. Down every rabbit hole, there is a little rabbit. Dig deep and you will find it. Or not. If not, then find another rabbit hole or buy your own rabbit, stuff it down the hole, then dig it out again.

Never surrender. Never give up hope. And look – there’s a rabbit, just going down it’s rabbit hole. Don’t go away. I’ll be back in a little while, as soon as I have caught it. Welsh recipe for rabbit pie – “First, catch your rabbit.” And watch out for those fleas. “Little bunnies have tiny fleas upon their backs to bite them. And lesser fleas have smaller fleas, and so ad infinitum.”

My AI investigation tells me that Augustus De Morgan (1872): The 19th-century mathematician popularized the rhyming couplet known as Siphonaptera (the biological order of fleas):

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.


Sometimes

IMG_0130

Sometimes the road seems uphill all the way. Lungs burn. Breath comes hot and hard and chunky in the throat. Legs hang heavy, muscles will not obey the owner’s instructions.

Consult the operating manual: “Take a break,” it says. “Rest now. Don’t push too hard.” But to rest is to give in, to come to an abrupt halt, or to drift backwards down the hill.

What stubborn streak is painted so deep in us that it shouts ‘never surrender’ when our most urgent need seems to be to throw in the towel? Is it the urge to get to the top, to see the lower lands stretched out below us? Or is it the mantra of fight the good fight?

Many things can drive us on: a need, a desire, a whim, an urge, or merely a refusal to stop fighting. Some of us will never give up. We will never lie down and curl up in a corner, a dead leaf to be blown hither and thither by the cold night wind.

Look carefully: there are no drugs, no needles, in the biker’s uniform. There is no small accessory motor hidden in the back wheel to help when times get hard.

The mouth is open, the eyes are set on the target, the legs still move, the sun still shines, and three smiling heart-shaped faces cheer the cyclist on.

Who can they be, these three angels at the road side, who can they be? Yet they are there and we are here and the bike is there and the hill is there and sometimes … yes, sometimes, the road IS uphill all the way.

But we keep the pedals turning and we don’t get off our bikes … and that’s life.

Pot Holes

Car tire over a pothole containing small monster figurines with aggressive faces
A car tire hovers above a pothole filled with snarling monster sculptures.

Big Sister
replaced Big Brother
and generously
generated this image

“Watch out for that pot hole!”
“Which one?”
Snap, crackle, pop!
“That one.”

Pot Holes

Jack Pine Sonnet

Welcome to Pot Hole time.
It’s all yours and it’s all mine.
Mine, possession, not land mine,
though hitting one at speed
will rattle your teeth,
shake your spine, and leave you
feeling far from divine.

Pot Holes, Pot Holes, everywhere,
filled with water you can’t drink.
They hide the depth of every hole
with waters, dark as ink.

Spring’s freeze and thaw
breed ever more Pot Holes
than we had before. I think at night
they stay out late,
to fornicate, and celebrate.

A low spring sun in the driver’s eyes
makes shadows shift and slide.

A mazy life full of chance
drawing a labyrinthine thread
through a maze of Pot Holes
that we dread, the morning sun
blinding our eyes so we cannot see
the Pot Holes’ size
nor how they move and dance.

Big Sister
replaced Big Brother
and generously
generated this image

Comment:

This is wonderful fun. Moo has ceased to be jealous of Big Brother and Big Sister with their attempts to read my mind. And what a great job they do of it. All in the cause of the Pot Hole Dance Season. Have you seen the Pot Holes dance? You know, one minute there isn’t one and about and then a split second later – CLANK! The dreaded tire pressure light comes on. You turn it off. It comes back on. You turn it off. It comes back on.

You stop the car at the roadside, turn off the engine, get out, and check the tires. They look all right. You kick them or tap them with a stick. They all sound all right and they all sound the same. You get back into the car. You start the engine. All the lights come on. All the lights go off. Except one – the dreaded tire pressure light. Well, I can swear pretty well in about five languages. I turn the tire light off. Wonder of wonders, it goes away.

I am so happy. I turn on the radio. I clap my hands. And CLANK! I drive into another Pot Hole that appeared from nowhere and walked or danced or shimmied or slithered into the road right in front of your car. You guessed it – and the tire pressure light comes on!

Waist Land

Wind-sculpted tree on rocky coastline with turbulent ocean and cloudy sky
A lone, wind-shaped tree stands on rugged coastal rocks under a cloudy sky

Image generated
not by Big Brother
but by Little Brother
who left the Frying Squad
to become a painter
and mind-reader

Waist Land

Jack Pine Sonnet

living in a waste land
surrounded by books
he writes in his journal
things false and true
in memory of the old days
when the world seemed so new

a life built on sand
slips through his fingers
wouldn’t it be grand
if the sand stays and lingers
refusing to pass through
the hour glass’ waist
so time stops to flow

then he could say no
leave me alone
there’s more sand to fall
I don’t want to go

Comment:

It’s a bit like a cliff-hanger, isn’t it? Hanging on by our fingertips and not daring to look at the depths down below. We know they are there, but look, there’s a tiny fossil in the fissure in the rock, so much older than us, we’ve got a long time to go to catch that up. And remember – 80 is not old, if you are a stone!

Treading air – great fun. Not as good as treading warm water in the local YMCA. Just a lovely sense of balance, floating there in the warmth, no weight on arthritic joints, and the world around us amniotic, as it was in the beginning. Ah, those original waters, we have all swum in them, the rich and the poor, the black and the white, and all shades in between. Even King Charles and the late Queen. And remember, they may speak of blue bloods, but all blood is red -and, if you cut us, do we not bleed.

Speaking of bleeding – blood-thinners – my favorite doctor’s latest joke. I cut my arm the other night, getting into bed. Didn’t even notice. Pillows and sheets soaked in blood when I woke up and my scalloped arm, stuck to the sheet, opened itself up and started to bleed again. Feels like seventeenth century Spain, the wounds of the dead man re-open and start to bleed when the assassin appears before him. Certain truth. Obviously 100% guilty.

And they tell me that in South Wales people are adding cooking oil to gasoline to make the petrol go further. Scotland Yard sent the Flying Squad to South Wales to sniff people’s exhaust pipes to see if they were cheating the tax man. I asked my friend – “Is this true?” “Ah, yes,” he said in his lovely Welsh lilt, “and we call them the Frying Squad!”

Runaway

Runaway

I waited until the boys
in the dormitory slept.
snores, whimpers, children
snuffling, crying in their sleep.

I dressed in the dark,
crept downstairs, opened
the school’s back door,
moved silently to the gates,
and climbed over them.

I stood at the roadside,
stuck out my thumb
at the cars that passed,
not many at one AM.

A cloudless night,
bright stars, dark sky.
A sense of imminent freedom
washed over me.

The fourth car stopped.
A man and a woman.
They opened the door,
let me in, turned around,
and drove me back to school.

I stood in the hall watching
the swing of the pendulum
as the head master, in pajamas,
thanked the couple
for bringing me back to school.

That night, he led me quietly
back to bed. Every night,
for a week, he removed
my clothes from the chair
beside my bed.

I ran away again and again.
No matter where I went
my own face stared
back at me from the mirror.

One day, I realized
I was running from myself.
When that happened,
the running finally stopped,
and I confronted my demons.

Comment:

I guess we are all motivated by flight or fight and I have always believed in the powers of flight – per ardua ad astra – through hardship to the stars, the motto of the Royal Air Force, I believe. Yet running really does no good, especially when we are running from our own interior demons. I hated that particular boarding school, my second, even more than I did my first one. I hated it with a deeply rooted inner loathing that still seethes inside me when I think about it. And that particular ‘first escape’ remains printed indelibly on my mid, every footstep, every floor board that creaked, every shadow that threatened.

Much later in life, while attending my fourth boarding school, one of the slightly better ones, with a strong emphasis on the slightly, my cousin, an unarmed combat instructor, took me in hand. For three weeks we went to Swansea Sands and he put me through basic training. How to break fall, to leg throw, to arm throw. Then he taught me the sacrifice throws, where you go to ground and your opponent follows, you prepared, your opponent not. He taught me about power points and the pointed or sharp edged bones that could do so much damage to the unprepared. He taught me all the multiple choke holds, how to apply them and then the secret of squirming out of them. Monday – Friday, four hours a day, total immersion, three weeks. I learned so much.

After that, I had the choice of flight or fight. However, I no longer saw myself as a victim because I saw those bullies and predators as potential victims. All the vibes had changed. Older, bigger boys no longer bullied me. Everything, in the end, turned out all right!

My Love For You

My Love for You

A Jackpine Sonnet

Yesterday fled quickly by
today limps slowly on and on
tomorrow draws near
yet never arrives
if and when it does
it becomes today

As for me I feast on shifting
shadows my story a tapestry
reversed – hanging
back to front unreadable

It is hard to slough your skin
the skin once shed can never
never be donned again

My body white bone grey gristle
no longer wrapped in skin
is bonded together by super glue
made from my love for you

Comment:

Moo assures me that this painting, unsigned and untitled, is actually his. After yesterday’s doubts, I must believe him. He says it is called U-R-My-Sunshine. He also thinks it would be a great painting to go with this strange little poem that crept somehow out of my head and landed on my page. It reminds me somewhat of the church cat – it crept into the crypt, crapped, and crept out again. “Oh what a naughty pussy cat.” Who U-R is up to the reader / viewer apparently. I doubt that I am his sunshine after what I said about him yesterday. Oh sorry. You didn’t read that blog? Well, shame on you! You’ve got to do your homework if you’re going to keep up with me and Moo.

What is A Jack Pine sonnet, you ask? Well, I don’t have a clue. But now that my other buddy, Ryan, has introduced me to AI, I will ask my AI what such a thing might be. Asking now. Hang on to your seats. It tells me it’s thinking. Aha! Here’s what I think it thinks it thinks.

AI says – A jackpine sonnet is an irregular, spikey poetic form created by Canadian poet Milton Acorn (from neighboring PEI), in the 1970’s. It typically acts as a 14-line sonnet with 7-13 syllables per line, but allows for flexible line counts (e.g., 12, 18, or 20), using internal and consecutive rhymes rather than strict, traditional rhyme schemes.

Key Aspects of the Jackpine Sonnet:

  • Origin: Developed by Milton Acorn, often known as the “People’s Poet,” as a uniquely Canadian, gritty form of expression.
  • Structure: While it aims for roughly 14 lines, it can vary in length based on the needs of the poem.
  • Rhyme and Rhythm: Uses internal rhymes (rhymes within a line) or consecutive end-rhymes (e.g., AABB) rather than standard sonnet structures.
  • Style: It is designed to be “irregular and spikey like a jack pine tree,” focusing on structure and integrity rather than rigid adherence to traditional verse rules.

So, now you know what a Jack Pine sonnet is. But I bet you’ve never heard of Milton Acorn! I have. Here’s the poem I wrote about one of my meetings with him. You can find it in The Nature of Art.

Milton Acorn

“Oy,” he waved strong carpenter’s hands, “Make this
work.” I typed in my code and the machine
came to life. “Go away,” he pushed me out
and slammed the copier room door behind my back.

Later, my secretary came in and caught him,
his face pressed to the glass. He pushed the button,
lights flashed, the machine whirred and copies emerged.

In his hand he held images of his feet,
arms, legs, head, all of his body parts.
“Tape, not masking, clear tape, 3M.”
Flustered she fled, brought Scotch tape,
watched as he stuck himself together.

Over lunch he showed me his work:
a self-portrait, shadowy and cloudy,
whiskered and worn, smelling still of printer’s ink.
That’s how I remember him: unique, stately,
unmistakeable, uncouth, unseemly:
a jack pine growing in its own self-image.

Farewell, my dear friend, Milton.
And that is how I remember you.

Phoenix

Phoenix

for my dear friend
whose house burned down

the day my house burned down
nothing to say – nothing to do
the smoke reek stays with me still
my house on the hill overlooking the sea

it meant the world to me – I stood there
just stood – no words – no prayer – ashes
still hot burned through the soles of my shoes
shoe sole – body soul – all of me burned

invisible the scars – not fire burned
like the faces of Spitfire pilots
on fire from burning engine oil
deformed faces – nightmares one and all

the burn ward – grafting – rehabilitation
new skin replaced the old – inch by inch
so slow – not swift like fire – pilots
ashamed to be seen – hiding – afraid

the house – brick and concrete chimney
still standing – roof – windows – doors – gone
furniture flame devoured – I’m no coward
but I couldn’t face the heat – too hot –

now – in my mind’s eye – I look out and see
and what do I see – I see the blue-eyed sea
I see the house foundations – standing strong
I see my new house growing like a tree

old roots dig deep – a silver photo – framed
spared somehow from fire and flame
a diamond sparkling amid ash and dust
gold gone – the diamond sparkling on

will I have the will to rebuild – to till
the garden anew – the sundial standing still
counting only the happy hours – asleep
life’s storms and showers – closing it down

and this I know – rebuilding may be slow
but as sure as the sun will shine – the sundial
will awake – the phoenix will be reborn
from the flame – the house will rise again

Spring Cleaning

Spring Cleaning

Sun’s yellow duster
arrived late this year
gray cobwebs still
clutter my mind

I try to brush them away
with clumsy fingers
but stubbornly they stick
and cling and will not go

Spring came in with snow
gales and icy rain

Warm winds will soon
spring showers bring
to revive cold clay
and help things grow

Comment:

We have lived in this house for 37 years, but only once have I seen ducks land on the snow-covered lawn. Whatever were they thinking? Good question – do ducks think? They are living beings, so of course they do. But I am totally unaware of what they think nor am I able to understand the nature of their mental computations.

We share this world with so many creatures that we do not understand. I wonder sometimes if they understand us. Who knows? If we cannot speak their multiple languages, if we cannot enter their culture and their minds, if we see them as nothing but food and devour them as fast as we can, never thinking of them at all, save as more or less savoury items on our dinner plate — les meurtiers et les victimes, as Albert Camus wrote. Murderers and victims – and we are both. Murderers of our victims and victims ourselves to our unbounded greed.