Collected Poems

Proximity: my collected poems. Creative commons poetry — see the Licensing page for details. This does not include poems published very recently elsewhere: I need to wait a while before “collecting” them, so that I can be courteous and avoid infringing on other publishers’ rights.

The priority seat

The umbrella
The keyring

The bus-stop
The priority seat

The “Yes, please”
The three dollars ninety
The teabag
The front page
The crossword

The plastic basket
The chops, potatoes, carrots, peas
The “Fine, thanks”

The bus-stop
The priority seat

The keyring
The umbrella

The light inside the fridge
The power point
The teabag
The armchair

The three rings
The “Not interested, thank you”

The window
The couple pushing the pram

The light inside the fridge
The exhaust fan
The chops, potatoes, carrots, peas
The foam of the detergent

The wine cask
The armchair
The remote control

First published in Creatrix 49, June 2020

the analogy

a kind of bomb nothing ever the same after it
a program can act on itself
in the textuality of the Dao
so that people can read about how to do it

     a language that allows for infinite loops
     feedback with a microphone and speaker

     a squeal that blows your equipment
     we must carry the analogy through thoroughly

     one level mirrors its metalevel
     it is not a total mystery

     hinges on understanding not
     appears to be a fiction

about how to do it
because the writing

     the gödelnumbering is the beautiful thing
     the proof relies on the fact

     that any derivation is an arithmetical
     function of two natural numbers one

     is the gödel number
     of the statement being derived the other

     is the gödel number
     of the derivation itself

a kind of bomb
the whole that cannot be

     the world the book is divided into
     explains the knowledge itself

     number theory     chinese     dna
     if a system is powerful enough to encode

     information about itself
     gödel’s predicate     dào kĕ dào …     a dna

     that codes for enzymes that will destroy it
     a program can act on itself as input data

because the writing was

     the beautiful thing
     of escher’s drawing of two hands drawing each other

     the whole that cannot be
     explained in terms of the parts

appears to be a fiction
in the textuality of the Dao
the hub of a wheel where the spokes point

From A coat of ashes

Gödel’s theorem is explained in Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter, Harvester 1979, from which the quoted fragments in stanzas 3–5 are taken (p. 708), and which also discusses feedback, DNA and Escher’s drawings.

The quoted fragment in the first and final stanzas is from Daoism: A Short Introduction by James Miller, Oneworld Publications 2003, p. 149.

The Chinese fragment in stanza 14 is the first three words of the Dao De Jing; the image of the hub occurs in chapter 11.

The upper bound

10-21, 1 zeptometer
10000.html
61 megaparsecs, diameter of the local
About 60 million light-years away in the constellation of Virgo
A Chill Book, A Chill Philosophy
A Chinese way of saying “myriad things”
A dense soup of electron & quark plasma that provides
And does not strive. It flows in places
And the largest voids and filaments
Are the sum of entities generated
By the joining of yin and yang.
Cartoon Guide to the Fascinating Realm
Cats, toasters, people, the sun
Chapter 16 — weed’s home page
Covering all aspects of Taoist history
Diameter (in metres) of the Virgo Supercluster
Empty yourself of everything. Let the mind rest at peace.

Galaxy clusters arrange themselves
I have been reading the Tao Te Ching
In dwelling, be …
In the past years, several attempts have been made
In the philosophical schools.
In these writings Lao Tzu sets out
isbn=3662495090
Is fundamental

Its name is the Virgo Supercluster
John Cage: The ten thousand
Language versions, the line which
Lao Tzu and I have noticed
Means “All created things”. Chapter 1
Measuring the observable universe
Merely a biological drawback
Myriad creatures definition
Named objects and things of the universe

Non-dual consciousness
On a larger scale is something
Once thought to be the largest
Our galaxy, our local
Our local group of galaxies is being pulled
qid=201202215063142AATHvCU
Quarks combine to form particles called hadrons, the most stable of which
Returning to the beginning of things, or to one’s own childhood
Rise and fall while the Self watches
Subcomponents of quarks and leptons

Superclusters are typically seen
That tiny dot that you can hardly make out
The Big Bang, Second Edition
The Big Bang, Third Edition
The Canon of Reason and Virtue
the_hermitage/intro.
There really isn’t much of a creation myth
The Tao Te Ching (incomplete)
The ten thousand creatures and all plants and trees
The ten thousand things summary
The translator accepted the following version:

The Universe by Numbers
The upper bound
The Virgo Supercluster or the Local Supercluster
This is when the theory starts to go wrong.
This page relates
To connote the material diversity of the universe
To represent accurately in our minds
Two Up-Quarks and one Down-Quark. Right?

Universe Today
Upper limit (in metres) on the size of the quark
Very difficult to represent
Water drop, Cell, DNA
What exactly are superclusters and filaments and voids
When the self retreats
With regions of such size collapsing under their own gravity
www.mother-god.com
You are More Important Than a Quark

From A coat of ashes

Made from text taken from Google searches on “quark supercluster” and “ten thousand things taoism”