from Anatomies of Melancholy

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Wayne Clements


a few Worcestershire excommunications
melancholy perturbations mind produce
slaughterhouses remote transported to
enticing Philostratus cries Charybdis

Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS | Tagged

After Michael Winkler’s Where Signs Resemble Thoughts

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Pascalle Burton

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Calculus of Market Day

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Allan Lake

(Capo d’Orlando, Sicily)

The song of the nearby jackhammer,
removing cancerous concrete – the salt
the sea – is lackadaisical but I prefer it
to the relentless disco beat at this cafe
just outside the sweltering Thursday market.
Am I interested to see how many delights can
be confected from sugar? My waistline speaks
volume. And there’s air-con and espresso.
Maria awoke inspired, recalling her vision
of a desired rug as if, overnight, rugs
mysteriously became revelatory,
like those cornetti con nutella.
Just as a Sicilian man would know how
to renew concrete, a Sicilian woman knows
how to get the best price on a market rug
that already is incredibly cheap because
slaves attached to machines on a continent
she’ll never visit, even if she wins Lotto,
make temptingly cheap imitation Persian rugs.
Sicilians, hardened by successive invasions
before the current retail one, have weathered
bullying from every direction. The curse
of being geographically well-endowed.
Everybody wants to screw you but that’s
just history, today is market day and merchants
crave cash before siesta. Jackhammer’s lament
peters out and now there’s a rug that must be
shouldered to our foreign car with peeling paint –
the salt the sea.

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tabula rasa

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Ronald Wilkins

many international visitors came
to the mathematics department on study
leave the secretary told me of one

who couldn’t start each morning without
a fresh pad and new pencil ever obliging
she recycled his little-used pads and

pencils to others married to an astronomer
she appreciated the way so many things
from love to the universe arise from nothing

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1 + 1 = 1

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Nicholas Komodore

from the series Amphoteric Poems

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Lottery

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Matthew Louttit

Birthday, hometown address,
Indivisible prime, thirteen
Cowards avoid: hived and released
Are the firefly chorus line

That dizzily seduced the random
To hatch a prodigy. Tanned
Supermodels and showroom
Wide-boys be warned:

Here’s an unexpected collaborator
Shot of the thick, tight knot
Civilisation kept lowering over
His head, well out of it

Now in a place of his own.
No relatives, no rental –
A pool, double-glazing and lawn;
Gypsum-white scroll and finial

And famous poets’ benedictions
Brass-plating the entrance hall.
Friends, colleagues, your attention!
I leave this in-tray full

Where it lies for greater minds
To trawl; to ride a limousine
Into limitless Saturday sunshine,
Debts annulled, the day won…

To grope, untimely rolled
From sleep; to take the phone
Half-excited, half in dread
(Let it not be shared, but mine alone!) –

Madam, are you sitting down?

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13 – 4 Looks to Thyself

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Dennis Garvey

Thirteen pomegranates
hanging
On such a small shrub

Redding over summer
turning
Crimson in the fall

Rubies ripe for eating
juicing
Dressing up our meals

Undressing at night
performing
The superfood of sex

Beneficial to the body
allaying
Declining mental health

The ancients named it
dementia
Signs of brain cell loss

Like forgetting to pick
fruit
After unseasonal rain

4 round skulls splitting
spilling
Brains going to ground

Shades of Persephone
sowing
Turning back on Hades

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Manichaeus

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Mantz Yorke

Your experiments are precise, controlled
against extraneous variation, and demonstrate
that, judging others, people tend to divide them,
not fifty-fifty but asymmetrically,
so that negation figures optimally
against a broader ground of affirmation:
at thirty-eight to sixty-two, your determined ratio
borders the irrationality of the golden mean.
Yet it’s as if you’ve done your work not on earth
but on the cratered landscape of the moon,
where a brutal terminator cuts
a desiccated dazzle from ungraded dark,
and there’s no air, no cloud, no smoke,
to dull the keenness of its edge with greys
or allow a worldly ambiguity
of bluey-green or greeny-blue.
Anecdotal; not open to confirmation
by statistical analysis, you say contemptuously,
when I tell you I have learned, from introspection
and by simply asking, that people judge
in terms not of digitised dichotomies,
but of a fuzzily-recalled totality of experience
tested for fit against a slew of concepts
(meanness, dishonesty, friendliness, and the like)
whose composition is variable and indeterminate,
like early telescopes’ images of Mars.
It’s as if you’ve been cultured
in a genetic broth of pre-Socratics,
Shannon, Weaver and Fibonacci,
and believe, without any reflection
from the tarnished, shivering mirror of reality,
the binary cloak of theory and experiment you’ve assumed
is proper dress for a voyage of exploration.
With bearing set (not, as you suppose, for a continent
but for an archipelago), you carry on,
shouting your creed into an opposing wind’s salty spit,
your truths garbed in those tatty hand-me-downs,
vicariousness and myth.


Claude Shannon was a pioneer in the development of information theory and computerisation, in which (binary) digitisation was of critical importance. Warren Weaver helped to make the theory more intelligible to a general readership.

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Three Trees

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Michael Farrell

You

  1. I put the old apple pie at your roots
  2. I try to make you worth searching for, in the blah-
    blah forest
  3. But I’m not sure if I’m trustworthy / ranger material
  4. Digital harmony, now that’s something worth
    striving for
  5. You are prosaic, if I say so, like a pair of speaking
    scissors
  6. Smelling nice, in season (a pathopoetics)
  7. I could go away for twenty years; maybe you’d still
    be there, wrinkled and yearning
  8. Or maybe you’d have a glass face, and a hoard of
    child porn 🙁
  9. Even then I’d not learn the chainsaw
  10. What’s this box of chocolates, the editor frowned
    coming upon your biography

Me

  1. There’s a new tin of baking powder on the shelf
  2. To be left out in the rain, like a sapling, seemed
    fitting
  3. Going to a medium, hoping to explore the minds of
    newspaper readers
  4. They have unpaid volunteers, well you know what I
    mean, to look after the garden now
  5. One of those nought or zero anniversaries
  6. A hedge, but only verbally
  7. Having removed emotion from the equation he felt
    rather like the sea; giddy
  8. See the shark tooth marks on the bark from the
    future
  9. I haven’t blinked once while writing this
  10. Bringing the two together, as if stories in a thicket

Wikipedia

John. A dense rich cake like a musical instrument
Are. As thin as a stork in a drought
Roots. To agree on reality without checking
Blink. Round and through, like you were just visiting
the circus on a whim, and not stuffed in the cannon
Matchbox. This will keep the viewers watching
2008. When Annette Bening had taken an option on the
graft, and its iterations of fruit
Disco. Not the original you: we’re taking some nutrients
away, and experimenting with replacing them, with
things we don’t know to be nutrients
Do. Oh, you also feel like it?
Garden. Feeling like the history of the holly, or
nasturtium, or microchip, and calling someone, or
inheriting something
Hollow. Returning to the old book, that your friend
liked, that your uncle left, so you’d believe in
something, that floats above the fabrication of
evidence, like blossom would, if there was no
gravity

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In_straight_lines

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Ian Wicks

It’s the shortest distance between two points –
a straight line.
Running from here to there
connecting a beginning and an end
with every point between.
Short or long, thick or thin
in, some might say, the very opposite of poetry.

When the ends of straight lines meet,
first an angle, then shapes with sides appear –
like triangles and squares, and all sorts of polyhedrons.
Straight lines thus pair naturally
with geometry, and with material constructions –
they map dimensions, provide a grid
and in a curved world, they get things done.

Straight lines shape the basics of mathematics
by crossing at perpendiculars to add up
and at diagonals to multiply.
Straddled by two dots, they diminish, by division.
Two straight lines, lying side by side, signal equals,
whereas one straight line in the middle
simply subtracts.

If a straight line slopes, there’s a delta,
but if the loose end turns in space-time
a circle will appear, or a wheel, or an orbit –
those two ends will never meet.
Such movement is always relative.

Straight lines ready the blank page
capitalise the alphabet
make a dash for meaning
and turn a full stop into an exclamation.
They pitch music, on staves and leger lines.
Whichever way you look at it,
they shape a poem.

Sometimes, straight lines reveal themselves –
as the crow flies
at the journey’s end
with the spirit level,
or as those magical horizons
between the deep blue sea and the wide blue sky –
or in the mind’s eye,
as that invisible axis
around which the world spins.

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Clotted clouds

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Piet Nieuwland

Black ribbed trees
Sky curdled with grief
Through avenues of mottled shadows and coiled liana
Yellow crowned parakeet, kakariki angels
Flow velocity into speech and vanish
Like drops where u of a fluid
Into tunnels is a vector field of u diamonds = u (x,t)
As night drops its veil giving the velocity
While of an element of fluid 
Bizarre flowers at a position perfume the blue filigree of our soul x
Green mosses cover debris of memories at time t
Bright fires where the flow in boudoirs,
Opaline evenings of speed q glances
At the rip is the length of the fabric
It’s the flow sweet velocity appointment, vector
The rain outside gone such that wind shaking
q = silent gestures || u ||
In swollen moments is a scalar field
With scintillant folds on lacy wings
Of Matariki starlight

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Sausage

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Darby Hudson

Think about the point at which science can no longer explain anything at all and focus all the energy from that thought inside an uncooked sausage you are holding. Now feed that sausage to a stray dog on the street and note the mystery of the wagging tail.

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An old woman remembers

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Ross Jackson

her four husbands, each man a puzzle

beetroot stains on his pale grey jacket
an obvious clue on the first date
not to engage with the man who became
The first husband

should have withdrawn from Man number two
when he began to speak baby talk to his penis
(as if it were a pink budgie and just as cute it wasn’t)
but by then too late

The third man, like the eponymous character
of the Orson Welles film, had secrets to be dug up
and she had him buried in soft grey sand
on a hot Perth summer’s day

given that he’d had six wives prior, and she’d
already had three husbands, then quite frankly
Number four was a puzzle she should have solved
well before

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Titicaca as Tourist Conversion

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Julie Maclean

Gas and dust not algorithms
explain the birth of a sun
not water in rectangular channels
of a dead metropolis
not stories irrigated by breasts
of a thousand goddesses
the sacrifice of lama tired stones all that hoo-ha

But however ravaged the land, he says,
it gives back faith, beer, fuck off with a rake
when we stop to gawp to ooh aaah

Then there’s the thrill
of multitudes gathering
in a raised ceremonial place
where the fat controller of chance and light
prepares the knackering theatre
of a new season
hacking at virgins’ limbs viscera as red rain
tumbling down hewn steps
heads rolling to the roar

This is how it’s done he says in myth of snake, puma, condor
quarrying totems of stone scalped hair

We see pigs root in the muck chickens cackle and shit
among monoliths abandoned in the plough-scape

This is how it is

green andesite modified faced-off

bound & bountiful

boys and girls like you
sucking moon-sperm as fruit

unfurling like missiles screaming
into everyone’s soil

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brideshead reloaded

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Ursula Robinson-Shaw

baby likes it when i get polemical i say stuff like torture’s bad
but punching is good she’s like no that’s wrong
so i can be the libertine

letter home says : tram routes are astrology for melbourne
if you calculate them right you can make a profitable investment
a chance meeting opens doors to success and friendship
you can fall in love under the 86 at its zenith
g’day is the secret joke word strangers hide it in their mouths
like a gold coin donation
before they say something fucking awful look i’ll do it for you
dialectics, poetics, reflexivity, hybridity… ummmm.trauma……..we are all
very sad here

very sad about our bodies our boyfriends & global warming
our fictitious babies die in heat waves & food riots on the pikes of the faceless
& terrible order

not you & me tho aye babe ours died in a petri dish in the future
& we can’t afford them our eggs are fried anyway
our eggs are smashed up on the floor of our fortress
our paint-by-numbers mansion we do mindfulness
on the marble floors resisting the cheap narratives of resistance
we say piss off
we say look we’re marxists but we don’t go outside we stole the money
for this fortress from our dads actually we are squatting
our dads are no good we cower on the chaise longue
& our lives flash before us like a formula we like the colours
on the toxic smog horizon & there’s some good political invective before
the rays melt our skulls you try & take a picture but it happens really fast
i love your skull

o melbourne o heatwave dead possums & no-one to bury them
it’s all dangerous & horrible but kinda hot like that time i got roofied
in williamsburg
& you dragged my limp body down the corridor of a midtown hotel
like it was really bad but it’s a good story if you know your audience

“the paths of glory lead but to the grave” so said my granddad
he told me while he ate a bread roll then he went to sleep
i took it it was good advice i took a nap in the yellow wood
you tried to be a thought leader or a public intellectual
me i knew i’d be a star

o! o! we love each other like limpets in the big fear one day somebody’s
gonna say girls you’re not that devastating
& it won’t matter & we won’t care the dirt moves out from under our feet
the thwarted seasons reach a human scale & your skull
the loveliest bleached egg on the vast rock

Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS | Tagged

Number Poem

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Ron Heard

extrapolations from Michael Dransfield

2.718281828
137
6561
1729
–273
1048576
144
441
–1180

0

3.141592653
–1 + i
531441
524288
4104
1.6180339887
16777216
3628800
eiΠ

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6 equal pieces

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Helga Jermy

two gulls squawk and defecate
on the head of a penguin statue.
here in the state’s northwest it
is just an idle gesture like tide
pounding marbles on beach walls.
the bay is a bad act of geometry.

we can only cartwheel when the
tide is out two times daily lunar
calculations on flat mud sand.
a thousand shells spiralling despite
a lack of golden principle. one greedy
tern empties the cup of a whelk.

the bus glides through twice a day.
baristas stare out to horizons whilst
frothing hearts on flat whites.
the wind smashed boat shed
has become a kind of rhomboid
minus its sharply accurate degrees.

on the gradient someone points
a telescope to far ambitions.
infinity in figure of eight circles
plays light tricks on the headland
and it could just be illusion but it
could relatively be a ray theory.

a couple seeking clear parameters
in the angler’s cove overestimate
some blue blasted expressive need.
on the jetty flathead gape in ab
sense of sea. bucket list adding and
subtracting something more solid.

perhaps there are solutions but
the sun is incandescent white today
the sky an ivory white, the sails
hypotenuse against white flotillas,
the hulls riding perturbations that
propagate through waves of water.

Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS | Tagged

First – year philosophy

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Toby Sime

Does the eye of God, seeing all,
see the eye of God seeing all?
And see the eye of God
seeing the eye of God
seeing the eye of God, seeing all,
and so on, and on, and on? Could it be
that this conveyor belt of divine apperceptions
is the ring binding universes
numberless as Buddha’s lotus petals
in the great flat folder of a phrase
like multiverse; or, infinity of infinities…?

Ask Berkeley; he was – in some senses – Irish,
and may therefore have had the word-web wherewithal
to spin out of himself,
of his multi-layered, many-rooméd
book-of-Kells of a mind
the teletypic Molly-Bloomian infinity of Yes
it would take to spend eternity
affirming such a hall-of-mirrors God.
And hadn’t he – let alone Jehovah –
better things to be doing –
drinking tar-water, maybe,
thus bolstering the ubiety
of trees in empty quads…?
Ah, ubiety: the bird in all our hands;
the sure-thing we’ll all wager Heaven on –
I know I see these eye-blue, more than sky-blue flowers
of the borage here before me,
know as well as any Cartesian bore
I’ve tasted them before
in salads, and Summer lemonade;
know they taste of their colour
just as roses smell of theirs; their shading, shape,
small breeze-rilled rocking motion
are upside-down in the back of my eye
for moments so small they’re indivisible,
and then enter the mind that thinks of itself as me –
and still, I am an unreflective
un-God. There’s no infinity of Toby
outside first-year philosophy; the countless lotus petals
open only to let me see
that I am that I am – the mere miraculous act of seeing.
Like the soul that is sole, divinity
reveals itself in puns –
since standing up upon the wide Savannah of this earth
Man is self-same with vision. Esse es percipi –
what other meaning of I could there be?

Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS | Tagged

iknowrexia

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Daniel Swain
A fat one of Riesling, tostados, a tin of Spanish mussels. I’m a vegan in a bar, unthinking sessile bivalves & making list of anorexia metaphors (their figuration: gossamer thin, what if they were to disappear? become invisible?) Towards an ethical literature of anorexia, I engage in small acts of self-redaction. 

My therapist wants me to explain my boots. (They are actually woven from the tar of oil sands by Portuguese craftsmen who, decades ago, worked leather. I imagine fathers teaching them to grapple skin. I smell their father’s chests. I could live on the fumes of a Portuguese tannery, c1976. Now I’ve reduced them to this. Now Portugal will probably leave the EU, emasculated.) They eat terribly in the Algarve. As Simone Weil said: capitalism is an ethical famine.

Except she didn’t. I just feel the need to quote Weil, a referential hunger. Alice Gregory argues writing about this is hard because it is, fundamentally, boring. She’s right. But it’s not hard hard like making pangratatto by running a toothbrush over cold toast. Chefs now say they have a philosophy of food, which I guess makes me an epistemologist. What is it like? They ask. Just imagine a pitcher of oil pools o’er every plate. It’s forked logic.

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7 a.m. refractions

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Ella Skilbeck-Porter

take thought a strainer for tea
after steeping catch the fall
of leaves watch the colour rearrange

Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS | Tagged

Man Suffocates Under Newspaper Collection

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Carrie Conners

He spent hours reorganizing his stacks
by day of the week, morning or evening,
alphabetized frontpage headlines. Some
days, when he had an exciting reshuffling
planned like sorting by number of obituaries,
his fingers would itch for the thin paper
until the irritation forced him to fake sick
and duck out of the office after lunch.
He loved the rustling pages, the soft slap
as he dropped one edition onto another,
soothing as the first drop of salve sinking
into tender skin. Late at night he’d pace
the maze between the piled walls, his eyes
closed, humming himself into a shuffling
sleep with dreams of children chanting
the Fibonacci sequence like a prayer.
One night dozing in front of a stack
reorganized by number of typos, he was
awakened by the smack of paper against
hardwood floor, quickly followed by a shower
of papers thumping his body. Struggling
against the weight of disorder, he took
his last breath calculating the time
it would take to rearrange the fallen stacks.

Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS | Tagged

Geist

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Susie Campbell

Oscar Keip’s Mathematical Workshop

When my thumbs were strong, I worked
them to the socket, hollowing
clay cradles for thought.
I turned curves sharper
than a rat’s spine, joined seams
fast as a practice kiss in the glass.

Now they call me the ghost.
Each morning, I cough up plugs
of shining plaster. White dust
grains my skin, crusts eyelashes, sets
in little half-moon
parings beneath my nails.

Ten years ago, Keip hooked me
from the field, landed me gasping
on his bench. I learnt to gulp
down chalk, swallow puzzles. Winding
through his grid, I was proud as an eel
doubled into its own knot.

Back then we were in such demand,
our workshop rivalled Brill and Schilling’s.
A prospectus furnished, if desired,
gratis, to tease pennies
from tight fingers and pinched
university purses. Work is scarcer now,

but the students still bring
their designs. Keip decides.
Lotte is the best but the others hate her
because she is a girl. Her strong
thighs against the bench
resist abstraction.

Once I saw Pieter cry. He looked
right through me, crushed
her favourite piece beneath his boot,
choked on the rising dust.
The drains are blocked again.
I try to tell them, but

my throat is parched. Plaster
sets in a solid lump. Stops the flow
or slows it to a trickle, sucks
the pith from nerve and bone. My spine
fades. Light webs my fingers,
splits in the prism of translucent ribs.

No-one hears me whisper how
once, when I pushed my hand
into clay, a white palm touched it,
stole my lifeline. Gave me
a thumb print in return
folded into infinity.

Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS | Tagged

from Counterelegy

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Engram Wilkinson

What role, in the new world, will patience play? I never end conversations
first. (What else is surveillance?) Four dimensions confuse anger with another
dividend. A symptom walks into a bar, but what do you remember about
the consolation? Inside the kitchen, did light intercept you and turn ersatz
into lengths of angels’ marrow? Chevrons incline along the service road.
In another hometown, starlight involutes.

~

In Star Wars droids do not enter emotional calculus; they constitute
its logic from the opening sequence in which human society, as a hologram of
urgency, haltingly emits the eulogy. Elaboration is a forgotten policy
number. Storm troopers are abacuses of tension between the new, everyday
life and a future district. My father will know how to retrieve it.

~

Which anxiety was truthful? Our neighbor tirelessly repositions
his lawn chairs under the shadows. Is our kitchen visible from each hour
you tried to wear, despite the blisters? (I only want to feel guilty when
I look good feeling it.) Did you see, before we started guessing,
the tensile adolescents slow their jog? An awning neglects. It’s humid,
or was your point that we could, after dark, misremember the plot.

~

To stand at the ticket counter. To organize another side effect
along the brightening meridians of the tapering shoulder.
Thoroughgoing natures of the yielding dowels or you, first.
More slack, or a reflection’s edge skitters along the creosote.

~

A pigeons flies into the window. China dries. Love entrains
their party, piles of split wood. That’s no moon. Do you hear the sputtering
lumens? Windowless throat. Parabolic enclosure. Another
sympathy turns the faucet, or walks outside, and ignores the dissipative
repetitions under which I might otherwise turn, or comprehend.

Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS | Tagged

Function of a Function

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Nicholas Powell

A little light on the reckoning stone
lets limits become infinite for some value
varying with the spheres, whatever

the size of the constants. Bending
the moment, the body will reach.

Approaching zero our next step
is to find value when pointed out.
We shall chiefly be concerned.

The proceeding example on rotating
will produce a slab and the omission
of an answer, apex at zero,

generating cone and chord.
Sin2 a function of sin x
which is a function of a function of x.

Approximations were found,
worked examples of the above rule,
and yet, with respect, does this hold

since it represents any increase in
which the English is fun-
damentally linear and heard to lie

on a straight line with no intercept
by the principle of moments unlike
the ellipse and circle. Recall that

logs may be illustrated,
seen to be roots representing
flirtation, affiliation:

the usual table fallen in time
effected by temperature, moisture,
sunlight et cetera.

The controversy rag
clarified our ideas about the meaning
of a function for the whole family.

It was therefore necessary to vanish
and tan, construct a small rectangle,
some properties apt to be tedious

from sheet iron and simplification,
anticlockwise turning points
desirable and infinitesimal.

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