Danish

Unborn is to discover, not countries
or travelling puzzles, but our return.
Will dares us. No ills will take us. Rather,
as those naughts we’ll fly — other, knowing all.
Thus consciousness, a coward, is unmade.

---

Moving on, this time to the Prince of Denmark and his brooding:

The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, — puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
[Hamlet: III.i.89-90]

Slipping into the bit stream

Is it a selfish wish
to want
even less self,
less of this flesh, too?
It too sullies,
this flesh.
That it would melt,
melt or better
be resolved to zero
and one both,
a qubit, which leaves
no smudgy prints, but mixes
with others, entangling
invisibly as we flow, growing
into the most unthinkably
spooky actions,
viewed at a distance.
Pull us closer, Einstein.
We’ll materialize,
our selfless wishes.

(With an obvious nod and wink to the Bard, whose birthday it was a few days back, and less obvious ones to David Deutsch and his theories of quantum computation with the irresistably named qubit, which I read about shortly after composing the first draft of this poem, in a proof of entangled concepts).

Bodkin Between: Strange inspirations

It's been a while since I posted a poem, and this one may reveal the desperation of my sometimes searches for inspiration. The title comes from a reCAPTCHA prompt — one of those annoying but necessary little anti-spambot devices used to moderate blog comments. I actually like reCAPTCHA because it doubles as a way to leverage human eyes to help decipher bits of text computers have difficulty scanning.

The phrase in question — Bodkin Between — struck my fancy because of its Shakespearean overtones ("bare bodkin" appears in Hamlet's most famous soliloquy). I used the conceit of a heart as an indecisive dagger to build this verse. It obviously owes a small debt to the bard's great tragedy, although I hope you won't hold it up for inspection against the blinding light of those classic lines.

Bodkin Between
By Francis Scudellari

His heart borne as bated bodkin between,
Its once sharp edge, from youthful age hammered,
Dully cutting ever inward, kept close,
Not bared, buried in leathery layers

Awaiting a proper moment to strike
Out words, act, whether for anger or love,
From thickened air, carve himself a likeness,
But pausing, fear-full of blood stains, his knife

Rather stabs a path in pointed retreat,
Disused, each passing day withdraws deeper
Till embedded beyond his prying reach,
He casts without only his daggered stares