Beehive Head (My Brain Is)

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Mechanic Sentience

It's not that computers reveal themselves as computers by failing to approximate the way that humans answer questions: they reveal themselves as computers by failing to approximate the way that humans fail to answer questions.

Asking someone a direct question is like firing a cannonball at the ocean: Scattered speech splashes in alarm; the question submerges under placid immaculate surface, cannonball sinking to ocean floor, black, buried, silent, but present, displacing water & the currents of thought.

Listen to machines.

Coin poem

Written & then reversed (read this forwards): 

And begin again,
I will flip,
But if (tails) I should have focused on the torso,
Heads, I win,
I always think with my head first,
Head first,
Bottom's up,
Tumbling down,
Again & Again,
The beginning is the end,
Long-playing,
Revolver,
The thought returning to where it's from,
The bullet returning to the gun,
Powder imploding,
I shouldn't have done it, I know I shouldn't have done it,
Why didn't you just blow me away with a shotgun right then & there? 

Now read this backwards, from the last line up

Nothing Something Everything: Words

Note: The following tripartite prose poem takes place on three parallel tracks (Nothing, Something and Everything) which one may read in several sequences:

A. From start to finish, including each track (as in a traditional poem)

B. One track at a time (i.e. only italics, standard or bold)

C. Two tracks at a time (e.g. standard and bold but not italics)

D. Repeating some lines, skipping others, reading backwards, etc. (for complete reader control)

Words

Words are false. Words will always leave something out &

We have too little breath to speak every word at once

No one word can encompass all words

Even if we could say all the words we would exclude all the nonwords

Words leave something out & we see the shape of the something

Words create the negative space

Where is meaning? In or out of words? Inside or outside of experience?

Words create both the meaning and its opposite

There is no final word

Words were not enough to make them understand

I’m looking forwards, for words

This is the chorus

Words say nothing

Words say something

Words say everything

These pages produce nothing. They are inefficient.

Words on a page are surrounded by silence

A page is an invitation

These pages don’t work

My voice, my silence, words on a page

Given the words, you invent their message

These pages do not exist without you

If I could write these words in clay—in plastic—in wind—

Words are static on the page but shift & change shape in your mind

Why do I write about you & not talk to you?

I’m still searching for the words

Speaking in the silence

Private conversations inscribed in town squares

I arrange the page into armaments, architecture

Translate the page into being, feeling

Strokes, dots, arranged & interpreted

Words create meaning & we have to keep talking

Language, alive, an eating creature, fed by our words, & us, in self-sacrifice

How can the words so many others used before me somehow describe me?

Each word only lingers so long—the empty space must be filled again

Yet life is not filled to the brim with words. Observe the silences.

We are forced to filter ourselves into existence through a finitude of words

Written words are preserved. Spoken words expire but leave a smell.

Words leave a residue. Written words, though unspoken, echo.

I place words on a page to erase them from my brain

Words on a page make me think I have no body

We give words form to take our impression

I write to disappear, I give birth to them to die

Writing words makes me think I’ll never die

But humans & languages change & die

Words are worms in the brain

Ideas burrow further inside

& the words need us

Primed for a feast, I am host & main course

Yet you are the one who gives life to the words

Our expression survives, rising from dead tongues

Mind, nutritious mush, I am stuffed & wriggling with words

Our hands grip the tools, together, we plant the meaning of us

Others will scratch at the ground of our unintelligible legacy

& so I return to the dirt of the page to be meat for the creatures I made

& loving our sustenance we return to the dirt of the page

& mine new words from the dirt of the page

Depreciation

There's a coin in the road but it's nobody's lucky penny
Just a testament that Lincoln's copper profile has lost its worth
"A poem is never finished, only abandoned"
Paul Valery
Abandoned nature, abandoned industry, abandoned gray & green
Abandoned people, used up but unspent
"This land was made for you & me"
Woody Guthrie 
The first stares from the undergrowth but holds up her hand when I wave
The second circumvents the fence & asks for the time; it could be anytime
"It's ten to three"
Isaac Mell 
Fallen from a pocket, pushed out of a mind
Even the bridge will leave this flat-line road, raising up & returning to heaven 
"ROAD CLOSED"
The City of Cleveland
I fail to stop to stoop to pick up the penny
Is a poem considered abandoned if it has never been begun?

The long road going around.

You connected the dots.I lost the dots.Needles to say, needless to say, need less to say.Dig its digestible digits.Aerosol, sock, comb, cornea.The condemning animal.Illustrations of the mezzo-soprano.Trilling drill.Thorn.The crossbow, the decimal system.The fishing reel, the flamethrower, the iron plow.Hot air balloons, negative numbers.Seismographs & silk.Bromthymol blue.The common muscle.

The cloud chamber, color photography, electromagnetism, fingerprinting, the fountain pen, hypnosis, hypodermic syringes, insulin, the kaleidoscope.Paraffin, piano pedals, pneumatic tires, gunpowder.The lawn mower.Vacuum flasks & wire rope.

Anagnorisis!

Comma, cutting off: limbs.

Voyeuristic

We love the characters we watch. They comfort us. But would we want to know them in real life? Many of our favorite characters probably wouldn’t get along with us. No, we can only admire them from afar—or from very, very close, as the case may be. 

We see their struggles. We watch them strive to be good, to overcome their flaws. This is a privilege we do not have with our acquaintances.

Characters on television can restore our hope for humanity…but the specimens we see on TV are special. They are more interesting than most of us, better looking than most of us, more articulate than most of us. Their lives arc, while ours putter. They are streamlined, energized, entitled. We want to be them.