“Publications are listed in order of submission period(s)…”
—MeiMei Xu, ” Best Places to Submit Poetry 2019.” The Adroit Journal. August 21, 2019
Category: poetry
New & Old Lands/Water
In the deep, a subterranean cache,
drip echoes, hardened magma flows
turned rivers, unseeing fish splash,
the earth's heart is on fire, blows.
Aquifers, filtered-moisture fed
flushed, a sucking river vortex
pulled, underground caldera bed,
formed before the prefrontal cortex.
Gardener's vision, compulsive
separating out the amoeba shits,
from the snail's slime, repulsive,
drowning in what the mystic omits.
Love me, love my amoebas, gross
we came, why, reality is blobby,
mess is not something to diagnose
the only certainty: its sloppy.
Sea change, rich and strange
pour yourself into strange waters
our many lives are frozen, deranged
paper Jesuses offered up for slaughters.
If only, I.F., I'm fucked, too,
quale, a different cell, all
different moments, a different you,
same behavior keeps you a thrall.
Suffering. Dismiss the teacher,
sub-human, human, minor god,
in our luggage, every creature
carries the mask of self, a facade.
Can those in the Black Iron Prison
be saved? What of the Palm Tree Garden?
New life, from pain, is risen.
From lessons, there is no full pardon.
Somewhere, above, there's another
underground. Do not despair.
Wait in the depths, unseen Other,
a new sea/land awaits, I'll see you there.
There’s More in the Mortar Than the Pestle
Mazeways, reality range and glowing red
rat cunning, invention of engines, fuels,
tanks full of the stored fat of bloodshed,
machine-shaped, faceted 3D printed jewels.
Factories of fascism, launching rockets
on the ecliptic, living within the lie,
full manifests of memes and dockets,
launch determines orbit, STANDBY.
Red glare, the bombs bursting in air
48 hour screams, a pounding earthshake,
an evil tongue commentariat billionaire
declares, "All news I don't like is fake."
Idemopotence: same action, same result.
Nesting doll of lost futures, a relic
of an afterlife and the future cult,
merely breathing in the psychedelic.
There's more in the mortar
than the pestle will say,
what's real, what's fake,
what's in-between in the grey.
Semi-Auto Cut-Up: Experimental Condition
Pixels without proverbial provenance,
they both knew what they were.
Buffet Buddhists, defying cages,
tagged for progressive classification.
Wonder world, inexpressible problems,
all lonely, we live with each other.
Chronic complainers, a hundred times
a hundred, gloomy mind experiments.
The emotional surface of lost futures.
Do we know enough to know the truth?
Unconscious man grapples, but finds
little to grip, advanced, but enough?
Unreadable barbarian news file,
the experimental Machiavellian composer,
weary, whistles on the way home,
her faith in the process, crushed.
Semi-Auto Cut-Up: Another Offering (KJV)
Eat the congregation, together,
smite them afraid, blast vessels.
O ye dead life, mercy, semblance
of a kind, a measure of shadow.
But, they had no prophet, neighbors
and friends, children of fate, troubled
the Others, remember them not, no-name,
wilderness sacrifices, sore consumed.
Desolation came and passed, Death,
bare the enemy, dead, desolate,
good and great together into the land,
begat headstones, seeds unto the earth.
Father of water, turn thyself,
out to sea, high between, separate,
sing of the living, purify mouths
and soul, fetch their inheritance.
Surge, rain on the wise borderlands,
pull the stopper, flush the tidal womb,
from the unleavened, and the unclean,
reborn, another offering to be devoured.
Another A.I. assist using a recently trained neural network using the King James version (KJV) as the corpus. Since this is the first neural network I tried myself, I learned many valuable lessons. It took 2.5 days the first go around, and the result was unusable because of all the newline characters in the original text. I didn’t realize that the text would have to be pre-processed or what it would entail. I plan on writing a post about the process of making Project Gutenberg texts usable as writing with the machine co-authors.
Also, there is a point to be made about the inherent class obstacles in learning and using neural networks. The differences from having a dedicated machine running the right hardware is the difference between waiting days to train a new model or a few hours. On the other end, speed also limits how big of a data set you are willing to start with. The KJV is about 5MB, and it took 2 days. Robin Sloan’s pre-trained text is around 123MB. Spending 24+ days to train a model is a serious barrier to entry.
Semi-Auto Cut-Up: The First in the First Place
The first in the first place,
The Others, standing beside us.
Aware of destruction, strange,
ineffectual, a matter of force.
The bare path, dark and closed,
From the stairs, an ascent of
story, a complicated service, clean,
psychological, a social alone.
The world has not yet been consumed
by the light of the stars. A universe
has all time and space, experience
a sliver, taste a slice of the whole.
Poem written primarily with Robin Sloan’s Writing With the Machine neural network with a sprinkle of Webster’s and some selection, moving about and adding of pieces to turn it into something that makes sense. Strikes me as a quick method of “writing” cut-up poetry. Although, given the source material for the neural network, these will be science fictiony until I can train up another corpus.
I think I’ll be able to try a King James version assisted composition, maybe tomorrow.
sam | sara
Whatever comes together | disintegrates, falls apart
the skeleton key fits, | unlocks our heart's door.
Desire, stormy weather | on a cartographer's chart,
wrinkled, it transmits| an unintelligible, mad lore.
The key catches the lock | faceted truth, splinters
dirty data, overload | bits are entangled, not lost.
Progress of the clock | mind strikes, then winters
ticking seconds, explode | the play, dis/plays its cost.
Words wound the heart | basecamp Sherpa of love
jungle justice, swamping | red over red, absent, loose
tears pool, drip, a start | the unbidden kind, above
the tiger, before chomping | life: marrow or juice?
Sight in blind eyes | illusion becomes truth
perfect error, knowing | one's body is another's bread
reach out, touch skies | blood transfuses into youth
lives reborn, growing | feed, burn, then again, dead.
Frames on the pictures | no happy, was ever after
the past cannot speak | so all are new/old battles.
In the face of strictures | hear the freedman's laughter
violence is for the weak | born again into new saddles.
Dystopian Fever Dream
It's lonely, a technician in psychospace
a cursed world, an immortal cancerscape
residual runoff of human desire, the interface
with incessant demons and no hope of escape.
The lumpen digitariat, creating the villages
necessary for the village idiots, Radio Rental.
Sympathy for the monks, drunks and cabbages,
they say, "Authoritarian deliberation is coinky-dental."
The Mean World thrives on adrenaline poisoning.
Refuseniks, just another demographic of the dumb.
Honor dies where interest lies, darkening
what you see is all there is, all you'll become.
Love: Verb or Noun?
“Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.”– Robert Frost, Two Tramps in Mud Time
“Love is a verb,” a cliché
truth overused, still rings true –
a burglar alarm announcing thieves
in a grocery store after the riot.
A half truth, a single face
when there are two, verb and noun.
Caring for a child with fever
is love, complete and complex.
A child tied to a chance beginning,
a class, church, online, a line.
Conceived in an empty condom box.
Born to grasp, hearts and breasts.
The sick child of this moment,
descended, a baby’s “Dada,”
a mother’s passion in a wheel of:
mothers, fathers and newborn others.
Love is a verb? It may be, but –
it is a verb with history.
History, real and imagined
of princes who turn into toads.
Pedestals are for broken hearts,
the ground is where things grow.
A sick child tended, becomes
fruit at another wedding party.
Sea salt, bee wing whispers,
worms in the soil of ancestors.
An old love begets new love
and brands it with its mark.
Who can see the mark of love?
Who can say, verb or noun?
And later, who can say it was
a thing, deed or fantasy?
Mutantis Mutandis
Electroculture overcoded
A spiritual Alcatraz, thrown
in solitary, locked & loaded,
artificial dreams, a clone.
Read the unwritten text,
the rongorongo of the soul,
Nostradamas of the next,
turnkey tyranny in a bowl.
A guinea pig often forgets:
half sterile + half feral +
normal distribution mindsets +
harmless untruths == peril.
In the world, in the Abusement parks,
soulless sinceretrons of misogyny,
xenofeminist cyborgs & beauty patriarchs
together in a fuck rife with ignomity.
Anhedonia, sealed in a shrine,
wokescienti, schizo-critical,
pleasure threshold, decline
scrolling is apocalyptical.
McMansions, corporate pablum
billionaires in armed lifeboats,
in the flotsam of crisis capitalism
those with guns get the votes.
In the grotesquerie of the Real,
agendas, exopolitic extra-terrestial
over stochistic chance, to feel
choose meaning, over being immaterial.
Everyone, themselves a carnival.
Suspend truth, believe as you will
no difference, fact abominable,
same: blue, red or any other pill.
