“Life will bring you many misfortunes but you will find your happiness in them, and will bless life and make others bless it – which is what matters most. Well, that is your character”

[p.313 The Karamazov Brothers – Dostoevsky]

Old lore, a walking boot and long allowed and spoken

As out-at-heel

Not asked therefore, by-word wear-broken,

Contentious fitting questions

A more bespoke up-market fancy foot

Contemporaries extending.

Rumour abroad, their word avers, that vintage walks

With toes poked-through

Late trodden thought, parades, displays

In lightweight sandals,

Conveyors that make patter, smart new matter, up to date

Fresh off the academic mess-production lines,

Comes lame and limping, dyed

*

Its fibre-optic wiring that’s the Microsoft mind-brain

In shooting blitz of neurone fits becomes,

Man’s great main-frame.

Excrescences impersonate, play on identity

As effluent of multi-layered psycho-system looms

Emporia of brimful shelves of untold Woolworth goods

All sellotape and band-aid

So look you here, this well-knurled nodule, – that’s

For stoking temper

And here again’s this little spring, twist it, it bends

Forefingers

For kissing tickle once, for blowing kisses, pinch

A hoard assorted levers; switchboard toggles

That’s what thinks

Impost much-obfuscated by implicit cheap concessions

Composed so as to soothe our cowed, distempered

Self-possessions

Here is the futuristic face of second-rate modernity

This theme of human character; an intricate non-entity

*

The bones that hold our frame might render down

To make a jelly

Heat, boil, them long enough top shelf at gas mark 9

A Kilner jar to scoop the oozy marrow out

Report it in The Lancet, make a song and dance about,

What’s properly a cookbook that necessitates

A Nobel Prize

Ingredients for a pork pie win pandemic global pride

Reduce like bones to aspic in a basin

Humankind

Then blend the miracles and parables of Jesus Christ

Infer machine-learning - that’s not unlike revenge?

It’s dosing comatose this nether age; on opium

Such expert slalom slews construe a people

Only parsing

Reactive reflex views

Their glue says nothing matters and that scattered

Lattice patterns

Bring on tart-like human mind

Our arms and legs, and toothie-pegs

Mere mechanical equipment; working plant on building

Land

These feckless worthies theorise upon, dismember

Your settled better sense

That you in nature signify, are God’s best evidence

Their daring raids aim to invade a narrow spit so far

They do not delve enough though, nor commodiously,

Asphyxiate themselves, congest among constraints

Their gnosis misdirected digging dry and narrow dents

Are book-learned in intellectual untoward remainders

A widening reading, that would prove to

Reach and teach amends

Bring in a living air, an atmosphere, of supple hesperance

These glow with sallow know-too-much enamours

Meet mickle few extensional encounters

Unforced. And so they raise their vassal colours

Get recognition; of a displaced ardour

Their feckless murmurs burble on around the planet

Having sounded on too long in this wrong circus

At this wrong time - gunpowder plot got lucky -

This is their place, and these their times, all their projections

Are extremely cruddy

As doff a gender suiting any mindless meat machine

Which two-eyed pineapples as we might lightly choose to take

These and such dregs of learning, leaning, are their Pisan towers

New Babels; rose with gnostic spires like slapstick firemen’s poles

And these are they, alway, who think their thinking thinking

Whereas we the lees, the rest

Our mental divagations blear like clouds of fairy dust

Of mythic physick; cardboard comfort rags

For keepers of the vires read these sleepers of

The times

The ones who ride on pride founded on merit in their minds

In others no minds find

Purblind of too much worrying of narrow depredations

A shoal schooled on an atoll shelf who seek an ocean

Bottom

By crude mistake associate their shallow blue lagoon

A seabed trench to fathom

But worlds yet shall unfold, dark depths preserved

Are soundings unforgotten

Love’s wisdom. Who recruits our hearts, and cultivates

By character honing

A shambles shower, such He can make excelsior

Through formative, reformative, recruiting seeking prayer

Creator of the human frame, by increment His works

Persuade with blade that bleeds, examining pink hearts

Creation His élan, He is The King of all the arts

And making moulding men by acumen remains

His patent masterclass

The station of the mind His palace, His emprise

Creating He remeads us, teachings weeping through our eyes