Robin Helweg-Larsen

Ultimate Control 
(from the series ‘Voices from the Future’)

If you’ve the aptitude and love the role,
the Army’s always been the place to be.
Rise in the ranks, absorbing strategy:
coordinate, consolidate, control.
And what a blessing when those new implants
gave mind-to-mind awareness… and command.
Like the unthinking fingers on your hand
you can maneuver thousands with a glance.
The battle then’s to see what you can wrest
from other leaders, fighting mind-to-mind;
you have to grow, or you get left behind:
can you control ten million, like the best?
Of would-be kings there’s never been a dearth...
will it be only one who rules all Earth?

Ticking Away

You have hopes. You don’t expect
that they’ll ever come to pass
but you drink, think and reflect
as you look into the glass…
And you wonder what will happen
while your life just ticks away:
Tick, tick, tick, tick… end of play.

Science’s prognostications,
things you’d pick up in a flash:
soon they’ll start rejuvenations
if you only had the cash…
Cash cuts those who’d live forever
from the rest as with a knife:
Tick, tick, tick, tick… end of life.

But you don’t like thoughts of dying
so you hope you’ve got a soul;
and though preachers are caught lying
Heaven seems attainable…
But there’s got to be a Heaven
or prayer’s just a waste of breath:
Tick, tick, tick, tick… towards death.

Though you think that you’re so clever,
you’ve got goals but not the How.
Play the lottery for ever 
it must pay off - why not now?
But you never do the homework
so at question time you’re stuck:
Tick, tick, tick, tick… out of luck.

That affair you never had
with the person down the street 
for you’re really not that bad
and besides, you rarely meet…
But it sits there like a present 
that’s unopened on a shelf:
Tick, tick, tick, tick... end of self.

So there’s all the other options
for the things you’d like to do:
travel, study, home, adoptions,
building family anew,
but you’re aging while you’re thinking 
and the chances go on by:
Tick, tick, tick, tick… till you die.

Homage From British Expats

Thou noble, purest British race!
      Thy children we,
Inheriting thy every trace;
From thy straight back, unmoving face,
We learn the truest social grace,
      Pomposity.

To thee the new is never good,
      ’Tis duty shirked.
Thou’dst never think, and much less brood;
Thou duty-bound eatst wooden food;
Thou ever ramrod-straight hast stood,
      And never worked.

Britain! Served on a silver tray
      Thine Empire’s tea –
Respectfully we beg to say
We praise thee, but we cannot stay,
We have our duty far away,
      Escaping thee.

Robin Helweg-Larsen is Series Editor for Potcake Chapbooks (Sampson Low Ltd.) and proprietor of the Form in Formless Times blog. His formal poems have appeared widely in literary magazines.