The gravity of little minds,
All worlds unto themselves,
Do multiply their questions to
The voids beyond them delve,
Catch orbits of the little things,
To make them their own realm,
What joy to be a part of this,
Unending beginning.

While sitting dull in swarms of gold,
This tumult and confounding twist,
I see through hazy sight a hold,
To drag upon in violent twirl,
Accreting there the crusted edge,
The fool's descent of half knowledge.

You tell me of the songs,
The tales and epics of the age,
Far gone, speaking through passing throngs,
The budding romance of the page,

What language must I rhyme?
To hear again the old refrains,
How I long the vantage of a time,
Far gone, it's precepts and it's pains,

A puddle for a mirror,
A dusty way to meekly gain,
A glimpse of sweet humanity,
Far gone in all her ways but one remain.

A discourse on the sense,
Transcends a thought to straining leap,
Draws out a claw and desperate pace,
To salvage any meaning from the words,
Generalising far beyond this reason,
Straining feebly at the divine present,
Seizing but humility for our efforts.
Thanks Philosophy, it truly did need a song after all.

A world of other minds obscured,
By thick conveyor belts, industrial queues,
By automated baits and hidden cages,
I've almost had it with the thing! I'm through.
But here I find a dusty tact,
The molten microphones of old,
These here are real thoughts,
These here are real minds in bold.

Free-diving headlong into books,
A studied act of co-creation,
So seeing through the other's eyes,
Placing their tongue upon your breath,
You build the worlds they sketch.
You greet their take on man.
You see a glimpse of them:
Their hope their faith and wanderings
Through this same puzzled life.

Great days in thought, long days in thought,
Ever captive to a gripping thought,
In abstract structures and their striking turns,
In maddened grasps at language and its truth,
In fine and painful introspection of the self,
For philosophy and childlike whims,
Now ceased they turn to rest.
By grace they shall not steal the night.

Returning to our symbols,
At the jest and wit of such orators,
They open up the wisdom of their time:
Dishevelled hair and awkward smiles,
That hide a fierce humanity spent,
In pure pursuit of abstract riddles,
In boyish sprints and sagelike seats,
With friends and walking far alone,
With books that make the monuments of the past.

Through the slow fire,
Hours on the clock,
Beneath the ancient spires,
To the novel many flock,
We sit in some sense watched,
Beyond this present time when rushed -
Thoughts test, and show preparation best.

The end of putting off,
The strings do sag in sight,
Too full of understanding I forwent,
But now I'll learn it right,
I'll memorise to see it fresh,
In technicolour glaze that layers on,
Fashioning a seat for future knowledge and finesse.

Holiday ambitions converge in rank,
To chart a course through charted lands,
To hang adventure upon forgetting,
To be suprised by what I used to know,
What a strange gift of our failing station:
That a good insight can be sought twice.

Passing on such expertise,
Now present under all your years,
The tools you share and build for us,
The hand-me-downs and hardy tricks,
Condensed turn richly to the few,
Grand kernels of eternal truth.

Entrenched the weary brow,
Carves out a purchase on the face,
Striving for the coattails of a whisper,
Forgone rumourings and webs,
Less descending on the truth,
In rugged valor that drives mud to make a bed under each nail.

Sunny lives on rainy days,
Giggles of a couple waltz by ornate gates,
Common friends at pace in gentle patter,
Off to business of the smiling sort,
In much learning and exploring,
Tribute to the tender humming of the clouds.

Rudiments and polyrhythms,
Proceeding from my mind,
From mind to mouth, from mouth to hand,
Ever ringing out into the air,
Muffled taps become new cries as they -
Do learn to walk and slowly march,
Breaking rank in novelty of unfamiliar ways.

Surprised to see it come so soon,
A muscle memory taking root,
Undershadows in my hands of dialed in tweaks,
That wade through depths of time until they find a leak,
To pounce upon and drip into the present fold,
On my hands impress a budding finesse.

A march through many lands,
Sight seeing in the up-tilt breaths,
Which punctuate long dips into the abstract realm,
Where all is meddling with notes - a striving to conceptualise,
At times berated with sematic walks,
In others lonely witnessing long prose,
Yet others in an open discourse of ascent,
What a pilgrimage this is!

My form is burrowed in vestigial cloak,
Their shadowed arms lean to and fro,
Each setting here in different chairs,
Their time dispersed upon the sturdy oak,

Of all the scholars stretching to the deep,
I stand in line upon a subject young,
Informed more deeply than I know,
By toil which wettened brows in thought so long ago,

In time the fancy of man begins to rhyme,
Into Preceding Light he's drawn to dine,
Upon the mechanistic worlds beneath,
Charting abstract lands and fashioning them new.

Like dancing phantoms in a melting pane,
These insights seem to come and fall away,
At once I smelt within the furnace of forgetting,
The world unfolds beneath my lidded eyes,
All steps to where the path lies scattered,
The road leads further on yet turns to glass,
At once I see a face anew: rolling waves in polished jasper.

What gift it is to ruminate,
On all the ages in the soil,
Their books in shelves so near,
My burning curiosities placate,
Upon the abstract, the vast, the royal,
First eternal consolation to the gadgets of the year.

Sedentary within the folds chairs,
Encasing sprawling chasing thoughts,
The smoking trail of ink makes ware,
The sharpened sight and pupils taut,
Recoiling at the sharpest proof,
Descending on the droves of pretty pictures dressed in symbols.

Making friends not war,
Though samely on a battlefield,
So argued in a series of rebuffs,
Round cruelly dreamt up traps,
Dictated plainly in expanded thought,
Discursive hills and valleys for the board,
Until the silence reigns in rest,
Before it's shattered at a twice held awe,
One learned, the other flatly fresh.

Am I an actor in the theatre of my mind,
The dusty stage, its weary rebecoming,
I fasten myself an orator twice-lectured,
Ever pacing on the contours of ideas,
Two steps; the echo pierces now the air,
Mere fancy that I sit a playwright, nay,
Each laboured lecture casts my hands
Unlearned, my quill ever wettened,
And my parchment dry.

Working like a bee,
Yet finding pollen elsewhere,
Dusting textbooks, filling library air,
It starts a change of different kind,
Dripping like honey off the mind.

Tugging at my stream of thought,
Pushing pulling tusseling,
Impotent as to stretch my reason,
Sideways into contoured rigour,
I so thought but slowly slipping,
Mental tracks align with time.

Sitting on a problem till I hear it crack,
Patient hatch to something daring yet,
Small but firming up to strength,
Blossoms into something quite convincing.

Peering into other halls,
Their grandure carpeted in green,
Soft brickwork draping stalwart glass,
Beneath the vast suspence hiding,
Militant people in pursuit of books.

Tucked away in library land,
World dampened 'tween the books,
The way starts forth gold flecks,
Among the sand, a precious hope,
Enthralling to a seethe as I then glance,
Upon the corner of a picture struck upon the mind:
O hours by the books in quiet places to be had!

Friendly fascination for a people of my kind,
Who like to talk particularities for a welcome time,
Who know to weave a depth of knowlege into storied tunes,
Whose stories make my eyes to shine and prove to be a boon.

Advice that's free,
On good study,
On notes and books and tables for the time,
On good structure for an essay fine,
A good grace to me,
To read all the
Advice that's free.

Find the symmetries of a curve,
A tool to hammer out a sketch,
I'll add it to my belt although I find,
I miss half a swing for each I hit,
My arm grows steady with the time,
As all the memories I swifter fetch,
And grow the satisfaction I preserve.

Well goodbye my eager pictures,
Your tale is ancient and refactored time again,
But I shall place you down and find another lens,

I've grown accustomed to your fixtures,
Neatly on walls and sketched out in pages,
Your quaint flames and beams and glassy gauges,

I shall replace them with great whirring metal,
Your successor or at least a retold tale,
Drawn in silicon - a truly eclectic portrayal.

The eager pictures fall behind,
They took a lightness on my eyes,
Now heavy lids make days draw quick,
Walk heedless weary 'neath the sun,

Beside the swollen grass and waning stalks,
Beat on in pulses as the vigor of my heart,
Rescind the rain to call the summer glaze,

A squabbled scene of green to find,
Which lasts beyond all strength of spring,
Alas the eager pictures will return at dawn,
To test I last beyond all strength of spring.

Brewing over a mug of equations with a friend,
Carving out a graph beside stark circuit lines,
Weaving up a story to encapsulate the fact,
Cooking up an abstract thought of tiny things,
That make up all the ticking clocks and buzzing air -
Our plane is ready to depart.
Tomorrow we make our escape from all these eager pictures.

A practiced fluency I've gained,
To walk in languages and symbols vast,
To follow steps of giants in the wake
Of history and its captivated minds.

Their fantasy and genius care to show,
In objects of reason borne in Greek script,
Wrapped up in varied meanings -
A model of computation and its simple alphabet.

Oh the winding spools of tape that coil upon the winds,
Drawn out beneath these marching machines -
Automata of the dreamy kind.

I'm in that heavy room again,
The rain becomes something deep - profound,
Kilometers above pressing down and down...
Until the rumble is synonymous with air,

It becomes to me a heavy stillness,
It becomes to me as quiet chorus,
It becomes to me as toil of days and long spent hours,
It becomes to me a wettened stone,

The room three quarters lit,
Makes friendly company with air,
Onwards they tug the space without a care,
Until the dimming is synonymous with air,

It becomes to me a watching father,
It becomes to me as expectation of my own,
It becomes to me as cloudy reminiscence of this heavy room,
It becomes to me a passing place I care to be,

I care to be without the lightness every while,
I care to see the buckled genius in crouch,
I care to taste the fruits of work come sprout,
I care to know this heavy air and know its weight.

The elegance of these reasoned facts,
Expressions in no uncertain terms,
I've come to love to read such symbols,
Cutting to the core of things,
Stripping off obscuring particularities,
Until all that's left is quickened fact,
To which I soar and glide upon,
And make an engine for my mind,
To bolster thoughts and make them run,
To chug along in boiling fluency,
Until the quickened facts cascade,
Into their pretty consequence.

Clawing up the learning curve,
To find a little hope inside the mess,
Of half-way thoughts half-memories,
Of gaps in confidence and skill,
I found a meager cleft within the face,
To take a moment of reprieve and lace,
My breath with a slightest hint of awe,
Of where I've dragged myself to be,
Hold just wait - it isn't yet complete,
Until I acknowledge He -
He who set me up to climb,
Who knows what being me is like,
Far deeper than I know myself,
To Him be the glory for the things I make,
For all the genius and lack there of,
For all these fields and cliffs I find.

Putting in a shift,
It falls like rice into the pit,
With wealth of knowledge, practice, time,
All tumbled out of reach into the bleak
Dark recess of this preparation.

But I will see it on the other side,
When all is sifted through to glass,
When gold and silver flow with ink,
Upon the summit of my two year bout,
Where I grappled with my very mind,

And learnt to focus fastened as a hunter,
On problems on a page,
On ordered scribbles in the white.

The bulwark of my curiosity,
This canvas hanging on the wall,
And likewise countless through the ages,
A far time stone then black and white,
Come bare these workings on your coat,
Come take on symbol and this meaning,
Come solve with me my many proofs,
I scribe a script - you write on me,
An exposition of reason intertwined,
I look to see what we have made:
A saga in black characters.