Short Poems

Shorter poems I’ve written.

Let z Be Zero

    Let z be zero on the complex plane,
    Add c to z-by-z, and that’s z-one,
    Now iterate again and yet again;
    The sequence that we make is never done,
    But can at least be sorted by its fate:
    To wander off or stay within the disc
    In which the magnitudes of points equate
    At most to two (for should a sequence risk
    Those outer wilds but once, it must in time
    Diverge forever, never to return).
    The c whose iterates refuse to climb
    Such heights shall be our primary concern.
    The set of all the c that we have got
    Deserves a name—let’s call it Mandelbrot.
  

Written on Discord, 9 March 2025. A Shakespearean sonnet defining the Mandelbrot set, which Adrien Douady and John Hubbard named in honour of Benoit Mandelbrot.

William McGonagall

    Higgledy-piggledy
    William McGonagall—
    Poet renowned for his
    Silv'ry lament—
  

    After a cumbersome
    Hendecasyllable,
    Waxes bathetic on
    Girders' descent.
  

Written on Discord, 31 August 2025. A double dactyl on William McGonagall’s The Tay Bridge Disaster (1880), his poem on the collapse of the Tay Bridge at Dundee in December 1879. Its opening line, Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!, is a hendecasyllable.

Ozymandias Redux

    I met a traveller flying business class,
    Who said—“Two vast and floodlit legs of stone
    Stand in a plaza . . . . Near the underpass,
    A shattered visage scowls at every phone
    Whose chiselled lip and sneer recast in glass
    Tell that the market well his legend saved
    Which yet survives, stamped on the plastic things,
    The airport novels and the roads he paved;
    And on the pedestal, these words appear:
    ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
    Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
    Much else beside remains. Some hours away,
    Preserved beneath the Grand Museum’s glare,
    The pharaoh draws ten thousand guests a day.”
  

Written on Tumblr, 2 July 2026, in reply to a suggested sequel. After Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias (1818), following his rhyme scheme. Shelley wrote his sonnet in a friendly contest with Horace Smith, whose own Ozymandias appeared a few weeks later.