@poet’s corner, 21 jan 2026

web. the web. it makes me think of the culture war that’s been vibrating my pocket since about 2013.

i’d just read primo levy’s masterpiece ‘the periodic table’ and was touched greatly by it. the vile inevitability of war, hatred and suffering, coexisting, always, with the fantastic beauty of the cultural world. as the bombs dropped, the poets mined further into the dark.

the culture war will exist forever. because there will always be the poetic and the curious on one side, and the bullies on the other, who think that poetry and irony are an affront to them. but they can’t win. there will always be poetry.

this is called

atlas tugged

my next tenuous link is that we are born into a complex, kafkaesque web of demands and constraints that nobody can really make sense of. a complicated global mass of billions sort of winging the rules as we go. but as a child, i guess i thought someone was in charge. turns out, nobody really is.

this is called 

obligation, parts i and ii

as a child the buildings §

and roads scared me

in their scale

the work of a million lifetimes,

where did they come from?

and what was my obligation?

all my life i’ve suffered

discrimination

just because i’m shy and lazy. 

and inattentive

imperceptive, defensive

stand offish

and prone to mischief.

well, today i made 

a lovely little loaf. 

am i a valid toiler?

instead of, 

or as well as, 

a poetry mine despoiler?

have i met 

my productivity minimum

am i entitled to a break yet?

i posit that if workers suffer 

ceo’s should go to jail

follow the money to personal wealth 

and pierce the corporate veil

i am terrible at job interviews. i am naturally averse to self-celebration, and not fast at thinking. a bit overly literal. dumbfounded by even the most predictable tell me about a time when. however, there is one question that i could answer endlessly – tell me your greatest weakness.

this next piece picks up the idea of the poetry mine. are dictionaries tangled webs of poetry, and is it our job as poets to untangle those words, and spin them back, into their right place?

this is called

reverse engineering

every poem, novel, recipe 

and joke 

exists quiet in the ether

the poet doesn’t create 

she discovers; 

with a notebook she uncovers.

a subterranean homesick miner,

reverse engineering blueprints

of a universal designer

following on from that, this is sort of the philosophy of the common law legal system. when judges set precedents, they aren’t creating laws… they have applied legal principles to novel situations, and hence sort of, found law that isn’t new, just they never had to use it before, so they didn’t know about it.

so this is called 

a very short poem about the criminal justice system

convicted, bailed,

acquitted, jailed,

the four court outcomes

how nice that they rhyme

so it’s easy to write poems

if you’re on trial for a crime 

and i would recommend writing poetry if you are going through that sort of experience. trial, divorce, diagnosis, bereavement. lots of good material.

i’m returning to web as internet. calling back to web 1.0, circa y2k.

this is called

the failure and possible redemption of language

we don’t yet have the language

for the time in which we live

the 2010s, the 2020’s, 

don’t feel lived in like the 90s

like naturally stressed 501s 

two sizes too big 

in each direction

y2k was the last mass adopted nickname

there is no confidence yet

in the unfolding millennium

so i propose a radical redetermination 

y2k of d2k, 

then d2k.1, 

now 2k.2, 

or, i posit “point two” 

in practice 

that’s all from me