Random Access

Spring? 2008

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

---

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.

Camera Obscura

Fall 2007?

Pandora, please, open your windows,
For only you know they are already open.
I have been painting them silver,
I have been passing magnets over them,
Watching red turn green turn black

Pandora, please, open your door.
If I am washed away by the midnight
That leaks out from the aperture,
Then I am already drowned in it,
Decibels turning over on a white axis

Pandora, shutter everything, shudder,
Three steps the whirlwind unfolds in the dry grass;
Hand me your brushes, your lance and shield.

Pandora, blessed with panther’s feet,
Pass over the patterned streets
That I covered in sawgrass,
Fearing to step too lightly.

Pandora, my brush, my lance and shield,
I will paint you in fiery ink
Pressed from fountains of the sun.

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.

F1R57 P057

Constructing a new blog for poetry posting, because Blogger is a hell of a lot easier than the way I was doing things.

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.

Introduction for the Apocalypse

December 2007

You know that bit at the beginning of Romeo & Juliet where they summarize everything that’s about to happen? Yeah, this needs to be the opening track of a fairly strange concept album or something. Or, let’s say why not, a rock opera.

---

This is a story about serendipity
and acid-base reactions
This is a story about human stupidity,
fundamental flaws and warring factions.

And Deadeye Dick standing out on the balcony
Radio dead on all bands
Trying to prove he can fix something
He hasn’t broken with his own two hands

And come on, own up, Sister Mercy:
You’ve been chasing your whiskey with whiskey and wine.
You say you can’t prove anything,
So quit trying to prove you make yourself blind.

This is a story about electromagnetic radiation
and problems with postage
This is a story about comic timing
…

And standing in half your apartment
While the other half sits on the ground
And waking up cold and shivering,
And wondering when winter came down

This is a story about modest achievements in literature
And government jobs
Both of which mostly are gone now
Burnt up for fuel or by murderous mobs

There were good things left before the fall
There’s still some good left after it
But Deadeye Dick’s got a makeshift spear
For the bad news dwelling in the rafters

So this is a story about the end of the world
And the things you might have to do afterward

Yr Lv Sngs

November 2007

You might say abbreviation is a theme here. These are all standalone poems as they were originally written, but I think they work as a sequence fairly well. They’re all under 30 words and 7 lines, though at the time I was pretty much just aiming for “short.”

-To Mercy (by many names)

• Yr red gypsy jangle
  Yr radio signal
  Yr moonlit face
  Yr hair-flown breeze –
  
  Casual and senseless,
  Sensual and careless,
  As the rhythms of the sea.


• Yr easy style
  Yr frantic grace
  Yr civilized smile
  Yr feral waist
  
  Yr face like home
  But out of place


• Yr high country angles
  Yr frivolous fire
  Yr name in smoke
  Yr shape in wire:
  You know all echoes
  Are laced with desire.


• Yr radical rose
  Yr seldom shows
  Yr crystal voice
  Above the snows
  Burnin’ up the walls of Troy


• As far away as you are,
  As far away am I –
  Meet me in the western sky.