Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Double chin, moonface, a slight waddling –
that must be a comedian
or a general agent for carpeting,
a bon-vivant of the Rotary Club.

But look out when Janesi from Budapest
begins to think!
Relentlessly under his cranium
the soft processor ticks,
a flicker runs through the data-bank
and like lightning it emits ballistic equations.

In three moves he’s checkmated
Eichmann and Stalin: Göttingen–Cherbourg,
Cherbourg–New York, New York–Princeton.
By first-class carriage he left the lethal zone.

Four hours of sleep was all he needed,
a large dollop of whipped cream on his poppyseed strudel
and a few Swiss bank accounts.

Even someone who’s never heard of him
(and that is most of us)

with a mouse in his hand sets in motion
his Schaltag algebra.
And as for Artificial Intelligence –
without his perhaps even today it would be
a changeling with no address.
Never mind whether it’s a game of dice
or a hurricane,
a fruit machine or a firing range,
the chalk in his hand limps on behind –
so fast is his neural nexus.
Manically he jots down Hilbert spaces,
rings and ideal. Unrestricted
he operates with unrestricted operators.
The main thing is: elegant solutions
to set the planet dancing.

An ageing infant prodigy with an interface for the Secret                                                                             Service.
Chugging the helicopters land on his lawn.
“Fat Man” on Nagasaki: pure mathematics.
War as a drug. There’s no such thing
as a weapon too large. Always in a good mood
when lunching with admirals.
Really he is shy, and there are enigmas
in the face of which his black box fails.
Love, for instance,
stupidity, boredom.

Pessimism = sin against science.
Energy out of the tin, climate control, perpetual growth!
To convert Iceland into a tropical paradise –
no problem. The rest makes no difference.

Then the staff outing to another island,
in his double-breasted suit, with dark glasses: Bikini.
“Operation Turning-Point”. The test was successful.
It took radiation cancer ten years
to turn off his synapses