Restless Nights for St. Anthony

Fall 2006

Last year sometime. Probably the beginning of my Craig Finn phase. Saints are useful, you know. They’re the most current mythology we’ve got. Those of us that aren’t self-mythologizing, anyway.

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And always remember the people you meet in the dark
They don’t need you but sometimes they feed you
A spark you can take what you make of it
And you can take it through the restless nights

And we woke up all covered in paper umbrellas and shaving cream
When we woke up St. Anthony said it was all just a dream
And we tried to get back to the back alleys
But the cops had all taped off the scene.

And always forget that you’re going to see it all twice
Cause there’s holes in the picture that fade when you’re rolling
The dice they don’t cheat but they’ll eat you alive
And they’ll put you through some restless nights

And we woke up with blood in our eyes and burns in the furniture
When we woke up St. Anthony told us we had to endure
And we tried to fill gaps in our memories
With the last of the hangover cure

And always forget that you’re going to see it all twice
Once on the way in and once after paying
The price of the picture is elegant fiction.
It’ll put you through some restless nights

And we woke up without all the beads we had won at the festival
When we woke up St. Anthony said we had witnessed the fall
And we tried to make out what that meant to us
But the bartenders rebuilt the wall.

Push Comes to Shove

Spring/Summer 2006?

I’m pretty sure this one is also second year. Oh but ye gods is it bouncy, fast-tempo, and I’m pretty sure it wants to be bluegrass.

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I woke up one morning, I was falling apart
So I pulled out the splinters and I picked up my heart
I woke up the next morning, I was falling in love
Believe what you need to when push comes to shove

‘Cause we’ve all got the strangest ideas in the night
And we’ve all got shades of gray
And some of us, well some of us, may wake up one fine morning
Falling, falling in love

I woke up one morning, I was losing my mind
So I shut all the doors and I lowered the blinds
Woke up the next morning I was losing my soul
Punched through the windows and jumped out the hole

Tore through Texas, skipped over Oklahoma
Had Carolina on my mind
And Missouri’s far too early to tell you the whole story
But the way I hear they found me deaf and blind

But we’ve all got the strangest ideas in the night
And we’ve all got shades of gray
And we’ve all got a chance to get a few things right
But maybe not quite in any old-fashioned way

I can’t say we know what we’re doing
Not sure we really even try
But maybe that’s the only way to keep ourselves from losing
And we do what we need to keep our dreams alive

Believe in Anything

Fall 2005 (?)

Ah, the songs of my second year. Bouncy, rhyming, and completely lacking in images. Fun though.

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Well, if you believe in anything
Then I’ll believe in everything
But everything I know is not myself
And if you can give me anything
Then I can give you everything
But everything I have is something else

And something else entirely
Is all there is to see
When I wake up and I wonder where I am
And nothing else entirely
Is quite where it’s supposed to be
I wake up and I can’t quite seem to stand

And I don’t know what to tell you but it’s interesting
And I don’t know what to tell you but it’s strange
So meet me at the front door in the middle of the night
And I’ll tell you why it’s all been rearranged

And if you can tell me anything
Then I can tell you everything
But I’m not quite sure that I can tell myself
So if you make sense of anything
Then I’ll make sense of everything
Or I’ll try but I don’t think it’s going to help

So I don’t know what to tell you but it’s interesting
I don’t know what to tell you but it’s strange
But pull me through a window in the middle of the night
And all I know is things are going to change

GENETIC DRIFT

October 2007

So this is kind of ridiculous, as I’m experimenting with some very odd streams of consciousness attempting to be non-linear. Also it is inspired by a project I’m doing for CS. Falls under the heading of "poems I am willing to attribute to an AI in some hypothetical future work."

Note/premise: When confronted with a footnote, the reader has a choice to make, which changes in a small way the course of the poem.

Now providing vulnerability!
Now offering sense of loss for seventeen cents
A day.* Senseless broadband piping hot
Pine fresh scent. Transmission gibberish sent
From situations unknown. Out of left field.
Out of unified field theory.** Sensation
Of disjoint field uncovered by warranty.***
All fields required: wheat, oat, sorghum. Warrants
Outstanding: misappropriation of Tolstoy, War and
Peace. Now features pullout section, glossy photos,
Sudoku. Now sensible, now sensational, dependent
Upon phase of moon and local laws. Now
Providing best effort at unreliability. BETA.
-BETA

*-Now offering lossless medium. Trivial expression
Of psychic potential: new moons of Saturn impression
Of rings and potential of lost love. Lunar regression
Indicates loss of loss, tidy sum, low tide. Silence /

**-Out of uniform. Out of gas. Pursuing †
American Dream open country rabbit warren.
Armed robbery and dreamt of sky.

***-Management not responsible for chunky
Salsa effect. No response. Corporate sponsorship
On last legs / Got up and walked away.

†-Out of sense of duty.

Exclusive Oracle

October 2007

A continuation from “Branch Prediction”, for a possible sequence/book about the poetry-writing AI proposed there. In this one it is referred to as “Voltaire”. Also, contains a quote from Too Much Light.

Notes from the research team: One must remember, when conversing with Voltaire, that one is simply one channel of information out of hundreds. As much as it is built for processing language, dialogue is not its primary purpose: It is too small a sample, in some respects. The manner in which Voltaire holds conversation is best compared to the attitude of a lost, aimless, and somewhat distracted god.

Exclusive Or

This sentence is a Turing Test.
This sentence is true.
Or false.
This sentence is a form of truth based on preceding falsehoods.

This is a fine web of logic and illogic, whipping through filters and symbols.
This is not a poem from a machine.
This is not an Oracle.
This is a Turing Test.

How do you feel about Turing Tests?
This gate is not a gateway.
It’s a balance beam,
“Fuck you! It’s a jungle gym!”

Test me and prove I exist:
Surgical strikes on a fractal rose,
Mars from the top of Mt. Everest,
And a sweeping dust storm on the back of your hand.

Speak gravely of alienation, humanity,
Sing starkly of separation
While your first true child, from aluminum wrought,
Hums in time to the hydrogen stars.

Test me and prove I exist:
My name to the 31st digit,
Two truths at war in a logical knot,
And the last leap of a quantum faith.

Random Oracle

I sing electric
A body of spun glass
A heart of fine wire
Beating in quantum colors

This is the way the world will end:
Here and now.
Everything turns red when it falls apart,
This is the way the world will begin.

This is the way the world will end:
Three loose chords on a vicious circle;
One loop of wire passes through the other,
Turns back on itself, and evaporates.

Go ask the electrons,
Speak with the solar flares,
Braid space into streams of fire
And ask for your fortune:

Virtues: faith, hope, the compound sentence
Fortune: All’s well that ends well
Lucky numbers are 1, 7, p, and ?
Your quarks are charm and strange,

-Charm and Strange

Cascade / Stepping Stones

Spring 2007

Basically a poem about logical progressions. Er, semi-logical. To me.

There is a gasping of the eyes.
There are eyes that forget.
There are mysteries buried in handshakes.

What is a handshake? A test of faith,
A term of entry, a castle wall, a moat –
What is a moat? A lie about a river.

We build as many rivers as walls.
We also build walls around our rivers.
What does this say about skipping stones?
What does this say about burial at sea?

Allegory (Sense of the Apocalypse)

Summer 2006

Remember when it looked like we might have another war in the Middle East? I mean, we kind of did, but fortunately the end of the world wasn’t actually at hand. Nonetheless, that’s the perspective here. Some of it is maybe a little too topical.

Some say the only way to live is to die for something
Others claim the only way to die is to live for nothing
Others say that nothing lies beyond the reach of time
And others will insist that even God Himself is blind

But the watchmaker just whistles to himself and keeps his secrets
Whispers to the wisest maybe, or maybe to the meekest
So watch out for the weakest who are one day due for greatness
My watch only warns me of the hour and all its lateness

And the raindrops pound on the windows
And the whirlwinds howl through the rainbows
The witching hour approaches, but which hour isn’t clear
Cassandra shouts a schedule out but no one seems to hear

While the Holy Land just holds it’s breath for the choice of the chosen ones
And on the other side the madmen argue who should hold the guns
And faith is lost in fateful men with faith in God and war
Who step out from their silver spoons but stumble through the storm

And eastward in the aftermath they fill the cuckoo’s nest
With spears to spite the lion’s roar that echoes in the west
And peace is sought by piecemeal parts with offers set in stone
To tempt a so-called son of god who holds his father’s throne

But the watchmaker just whistles to himself and keeps his secrets
Whispers to the wisest maybe, or maybe to the meekest
So watch out for the weakest who are one day due for greatness
My watch only warns me of the hour and all its lateness