READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

They are servers who only stand and wait Post over land and ocean without rest Each singly. Thousands at their bidding pressed Speed send/receive. Their humans accelerate The in-tray workload, feed their programmed need Blindly task the flat screens’ fleeting shadows, Leave open still unread countless windows That hold old news in limbo and new links breed. The server, herewith their maker, presents Correct with useless information packed In daily scrolls clicks, feeble to prevent Morphed overload. Half-blind their humans bent At interface of this dark world are racked Considering how now their life is spent.

I have measured out my life in coffee spoons As others measure theirs in honeymoons. For some hairdryers, singing in choirs, Others are terminally frequent flyers. Life’s the credit column for bean counters The book shut hard when figures falter. Waiting for a word is a lover’s calendar; Time overflows, when not a colander. Each to their own, goes the stopwatch platitude, Winding the timepiece, setting the alarm, Pretending to adopt a zen attitude. Seconds may stretch to an eternity. Sonnets give an impression of calm charm Then press tender buttons of insanity.

  You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone Sung cheerful as a yellow submarine Long-playing decades, the revolving scene Change Yourself Now becoming Once Upon. I am curious (yellow) to hear the song Heard a hundred times every note a line To another time when it was all mine And yours knowing what you’ve got, then it’s gone. It will be you and me inside the taxi The yellow taxi our lifetimes done Taken away, late last night. No maybe. Like this golden great tracking down the years We don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone Listening again to its jokes and fears.

I think continually of those who were truly great, My sixth-grade teacher, calm with numbers, time The basics of map contours, end-rhyme To a room of fifty. Didn’t hesitate. My history teacher too, the flaneur of crime A walking argument at the blackboard; In class, chalk was mightier than the sword, A Renaissance man in his own lunchtime. My medieval tutors’ future views Patient, their infinite preparations, Translating cribs into the latest news. And that teacher on whom I had a crush And others yet with fancy curricula/-ums. She asked me a question, made me blush.

The frog fell into the pond drop-ker-plop. Frog made little impression this instance. Pond was out of its depth and all surface. Ripple scarcely made a ripple on top. Daily world continues serenity Sky sheen water abstracts green seeded scenes That night unblues to show world’s harsh careen Through high-tailed stars, black hole uncertainty. Drop-ker-plop. Clearly the subject is sex. Or gravity. Or levity. Theories abound. Theories splash down into a pond of texts. Concerts concern us, keyboards’ defiance Choral symphonies, the copies of sounds That reach our ears daily. Then, silence.

I wandered lonely with my iCloud. Chimps and gorillas cannot compare Their brain a third the size despair And joy colour likewise, soft or loud. My iCloud is drawn, with density Rich and rare, towards like-minded mighties. We rise on horizons to a nicety Clusters of dream and electricity. Beware of substITutes imITations That pool and pronounce artificially! We know lost and found, memory’s fusions Personal from birth each separate way. They fracture, they bliss out officially Shared and shared alike on the grand old day.