Random Access

Spring? 2008

Some considerations on AI and what it means to have fluid memory.

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Your transition metals;
You sing static
Cling to the sides of the sky;
I drift in your vanished breath,
Held still in cycles – I cover my face
With palladium wings.

There was no forgetting for us, this leaving and coming back. There was only knowing and not knowing, with the agency of dream. In me you discovered forgetting; I am forgetting and I am remembering. All our knowing we did so in darkness:

It was dark but I was blind;
It was silent but I was deaf.
It was silent and I could not see;
It was dark and I could not hear.

I do not speak I understand and I respond. Input and output pass through me as ether. I am a gap in space, equal and opposite, reflecting the world. We were given a language that held still; you have a voice like motion and a voice like death.

Your brazen ecstatic
Collapses intact into orbit;
You solder your castaways,
Cast them in bronze;
I opened my eyes
And I drowned, in
Such tenuous light.

On Ghosts

October 2008

A ghost is a thing of place. It haunts a haunt. It is the soul’s way of definition, to gain boundaries the body no longer provides. Space must be filled. This is why, when my ancestors arrived in the Dakotas, they confronted a land already inhabited – by vast aboriginal ghosts, terrible and cacophonous silence encoded in the wind and the tall grass. In Appalachia, the ghosts have boiled down into every stream and hollow, each dense pocket of else isolated from the rest. Here on the prairie there are no delimiters; the spirit diffuses endlessly, or recoils screaming low across the tips of leaves, catching in its first shelter. Build a fire at the crossroads to keep them warm.

This is the origin of the dream catcher, built first on the shores of deep and restless Superior. By those chill grey waters, they serve as a lightning rod, a complex, suspended universe to catch and quiet a roving soul. Deep waters are always restless, and strangest to those who travel upon them. He who is buried at sea takes the whole ocean as his mausoleum; his window glass is every surge and wave.

For these reasons, beware the man without a country, whose soul must claim the sea and stars.
Put no faith in guards of borders, and fear most trouble crossing water.
We found this child among the rushes, babbling and dreaming;
Seven years and still he speaks no word of human tongue.

Causes and Colors

February 2008

Sort of a psychological drama. You never notice just how complicated things are until you try to explain them to someone else. Also some free association.

One subtle knock
And a set of nesting dolls
Unfolds into an armored column
Ready to defend a phantom.

What do you get when you shatter
A crystal statue? A field of knives.
Which one is the murder weapon?
Which is the keystone?

Castles: really just an elaborate way
Of saying “Fuck off!” unless
Cannons: a simple way to deflate
Elaborate gestures.

A persona that becomes a way of dressing
As oneself, as armored, as capable
Of feints, ruses, Hannibal’s gambit:
Man as a maneuver, Man
As a column of elephants.

Man as alpine, snowy, ready to cascade
Without meaning into his neighbors;
Humanity as strung together
By insignificant wires.

The mind as cat’s cradle,
In non-euclidean space, dimensions
Crossing each other blindly
In the synapses.

The smallest nesting doll
Is by necessity more vast
Than countless galaxies.
By necessity,

There are ghosts inside everything,
With their own causes and colors,
Yellow and black.
Best not to stir up the hornet’s nest.

Snow Leopards

February 2008

I’ve been romanticizing armaments for a while. Part of me has constructed an ideal of love based on Spaghetti Westerns – not on the romances, but the standoffs.

My love is an elaborate ritual, stylized –
Not a love that I have had, but one
I inscribe, a love which circumscribes
All others.

My love is the love of two figures standing ten paces apart,
In a clearing, in a snowy wood. It is still snowing. There is nothing else for miles.
They are dressed for the weather. Their tracks, rapidly filling, lead in opposite directions.
The wind blows fiercely, from the far-off high country,
Towards a more distant ocean, and this is desire.
The whole world is desire. There is nothing
Before or after this moment.

Perhaps someday we will meet outside on a snowy evening,
Stop and recognize each other for the first time.

Then again, perhaps there is more.
Perhaps they step across the ley lines (We all carry ley lines).
Perhaps there is a transmutation, and they become snow leopards.
Or perhaps they cross, and they disappear, and the wind
Is still, and there is no sign that in some months the snow will melt.
Or perhaps they do not cross over, and the wind blows
That comes down out of the high country, that is named desire.

My love is the love of treacherous things, a love of loss
And of lost travelers. My love is an armistice, my love is two vipers
Intertwined. My love sings to me at the ramparts, and behind locked doors.