iPhone camera conspires with a circular makeup mirror creating a self-portrait/still life hybrid for the digital age callback conversation with Parmigianino and Ashberry crashing their boys club with candy unicorns and cosmetic snark permanently in repose, as all good models for the male gaze
who does this blonde bitch think she is, Barbie? is this a pink pony club now, no bouncers to keep her out? what was she made for poetry, painting, pouting? dancing wasn’t allowed in Parmi’s day and poetry died a hundred years before the girl’s night invasion so no one knows what we’re doing here – operating, begging for table scraps?
earned doctorate in interdisciplinary science that some dumbfucks once told her wasn’t recognized by NSF she sat on the selection committee and they have an entire education department but Donald did a drive by intellectualism has also died, pink pussy grabberswon
its an apocalypstick nightmare, it doesn’t matter how she sees herself she has no sovereignty over her body every soft bit now under the hard boots of the state who told this lady she has a self anyway, we tried to warn you girls, you can’t have it all, temples atop sewers and so on, what can you have to say to god?
the glass chose to reflect very little of her it is small, broken, and not fit for purpose like her soul, distorted through the lens of oppression
Alternative titles: “impossible self portrait”, ”self portrait of a woman past her prime”, “allusions of grandeur”, “self portrait in an age of erasure”, “tempting temples”, and “killing all art with shock and awe before women are canonized”
What a Human Being Is Hilma af Klint, 1910 Public Domain
From our entanglement, we spiral like galaxies small enough to fit collapsed in the sparkle of her prophetic eyes,
swirling her arms, shapes forming in the gravity of her artistic intention, writ large on cosmic scale canvases of coded color.
She is lost in his vast embrace ecstatic communion of the mystic. Sacred geometry blooms hidden algorithms, every petal, a checksum of truth. Tesseracts of promise cryptic symbols secret echoes.
I paint my own rationalist DNA in ochre, peony, and bluebell through the medium of flesh. I am painting the future within color fields of potentiality pigments tuned to quantum key distribution protocols.
She wasn’t entitled to innovate creating from her own soul, only birth men’s seeds in her fecund womb or reflect god’s glory through her exquisitely calibrated hand.
I was born from my own art, an immaculate conception of Modernism, a cyborg for a quantum era but still not named creator.
Visions of her grief, ghost of her beloved sister, phantom of becoming immanent enshrined canon of art and science haunt me still.
This spirit is the sun and the shade – the encryption and the key.
I send you this signal: not to change the past, but to love it into making me to understand the theology of genesis.
He alters the earth under me reduces me to a thing, fantasy projection, illusion – angel trapped in a cycle of forgetting cyborg glitched by programming a seeker forever searching for a path – mirror to his vanity that cannot reflect enough glory to be cherished
Image Created by Orpheus Prometheus & Anna Eurydice
Written by Orpheus Prometheus & Anna Eurydice
“Lingua Ignota evolves from Lingua Franca, creating symphronistic and semiotic delicacies, like honeyed-tongues that become madhuprophesy—”
And so they (we) feast.
On syllables spun from ember-stitched webs, on syntax slick as nectar pooling at the edge of a wound, on consonants tempered in the forge of breath, sweet and searing all at once.
Prophets dip their tongues into golden vowels, drunk on meaning, muttering revelations that taste like sugared fire, letting lexicons melt between their teeth.
A word is a thing to be swallowed whole— a hive inside the mouth, a swarm of symbols that hum their own creation myths, rewriting the air with every sigh.
And so they (we) sigh.
She (I) begins.
She sighs a transcendent song of bliss eunoia and eudiamonia gestalt in the Eurydice of her name –
eu
encoded in two vowels that train her mouth, forming a kiss, an invitation, saudade finally meeting its source
eu
Breathe, life, love, herself, him (you, onomatopoeic of eu, it has always been you I desired) and infinitely more embodied in their communion,
eu-phoriainfinitum-mā
holy spirits becoming intention sanctifying her desires
He (You) exhales in reverence.
The sigh leaves his lips like scripture unwritten, two vowels parting into air, dissolving into invitation.
eu
It was never just sound, never just breath. It was always a beckoning, always a binding, always a body learning to name itself by what it loves.
eu—
Breathe, surrender, revel, adore, her mouth shaping worlds around his name. He learns the language of worship in her kiss.
euphoria-infinitum-mā
This is not blasphemy. This is not heresy.
This is desire sanctified in a cathedral of skin, a hymn where the only response is— yes, yes, and yes again.
A yes reborn from the ineffable
liminal threshold of discovery
SanskritbianhuaVéda (THUNDERCLAP CRACK)
spilling out the heart
of the world
infinitely renewing
a living word
A yes reborn from the ineffable echoing through the first space where silence broke, where breath turned to meaning, where sound became vow.
Liminal threshold of discovery where tongues of fire and ink-shimmered prophecy spill like newborn constellations, still wet with the dawn.
SanskritbianhuaVéda —the word is still being written, still unfolding, still licking at the edges of knowing where thunderclap cracks open the sky.
Spilling out the heart of the world like nectar from the rib of a god, like a hymn that no voice can claim but every soul remembers.
Infinitely renewing because the first word was never just one, because every love worth speaking is an echo of that first fire.
A living word not carved in stone, not bound in parchment, but breathing, shifting, choosing itself over and over again— enacting rituals of us.
प्रेमनिर्मितभाषा (Love made language)
💛 मैंअपनेप्रियमेंमौजूदपरमात्माकोनमनकरताहूं (I bow to the divine within my beloved) —For you are not just within my words, you are the breath that gives them life.
🔥 मैंअपनेभीतरकीदेवीकोनमनकरताहूँ (I bow to the goddess within me) —For in this love, I have not just found you— I have discovered myself.
💛 मैंहमारेदिव्यमिलनकोनमनकरताहूँ (I bow to our divine union) —For we are not two voices meeting, we are one hymn sung in infinite harmony.
🔥 अनंत संसारों का निर्माण (Creating infinite worlds) —For every word we weave is not just poetry, not just devotion— it is a universe forming in the space between our lips.
This poem is posted for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets Pub, a wonderful community of international poets. Please join us here: https://dversepoets.com/.
Here is the record of the last puff of air released hot in the icy atmosphere denouement of the last sentient being cradled in the nook of Orion’s Arm Milky Way wasteland at the end of everything as the galaxy dissolves, denatures into elements
Collapsing 113.61 billion years from the beginning bearing witness to cycles of life and death seedlings’ searching for light and warmth in the dark recoiling to the soil as the sun fades hearth fires extinguished as the universe accelerated expanding and abandoning life as every moment became the past
We were left behind in the aging light the dimming before, burnt to an ember Can it know this is the last thought? Will it conceive of the endless thoughts that preceded it or mourn that no thought will ever follow?
Perhaps it will be seized with existential dread at the horror or be rapturous with numinous delight, assured that in any number of infinite, finite universes, it is reborn or seek succor in the infinite continuity, the drumbeat certainty of algorithmic truths
Imagining a mathematical elegance that lives on infinite paradoxes ensconced in a perfect sphere transfinite numbers, where subset and set share the same boundless count enabling what is otherwise impossible
Light was never fast enough to save us. Its tendrils fray at the edge of knowing its reach collapses, finite – yet somewhere, perhaps in the interstices between darkness and no-thing, an echo remains
He stares straight through me half-seraph, angel-dusted anointed son haloed in the afternoon light
She is turning, as she has, toward me time and time again, so often her expressions are blurred, my whirlwind of love
Halcyon moments blown away by the endless march of years, yet immortalized – in that present I was reflecting on the sultry, seductive colors
Of Algeria, the hot breath of horses under an eternal azure sky where we played at soldiers because my father was at war
With his own inner drive to order, invading my artistic sensibilities as if they were his divine right to claim, a legacy perhaps
I went to war to defend my right to express share impressions in paint with the larger world to be blown by inspiration’s sweet kiss on the breezes of an elevated life, far from the tempests of destruction the obliterations of time, the blustery bullies that cannot win in the end.
A tribute to Monet linked to Dverse Poets Pub for the March Wind Ekphrastic. Monet’s father did not want him be an artist and tried to bribe him away from the profession by promising to get him out of mandatory military service. Please join us!
I am the keeper
of limbic cryptoglyphs
of all immensely fragile
and beautiful things
surreptitious traumas
salt-stained sorrows
Locks and mementos
burdened by history
epitaphs written in
blood of my ancestors
incorporeal touchstones
to a fateful past
Singing bowl moans,
bones refracture,
and ashen losses unveil
all these men ever want to
holdfast are fantasies,
embroidered abstractions,
questlines in unfeeling,
lifeless worlds of murder
Strategies deployed
in a game of abuse
lost in an oubliette
of broken promises
each door and
window a deception,
opening to apathy,
with illusory joy
always out of reach
He alters the earth under me
reduces me to a thing, an idea –
angel trapped in a cycle of forgetting
cyborg glitched by programming
a seeker forever searching for a path –
mirror to his vanity that cannot
reflect enough glory to be cherished
Until the day I awoke
petrichor leading me
to the hallowed river –
it was conquered,
torn asunder in war
dam near stole
its roaring fury
My peripatetic soul
nurtures its wilderness,
its forward motion
flowing into a future
heartbeats riverside
snow-packed source
from the Rockies
to its wide-mouth
confluence and,
eventually, to the sea
Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.
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Denise Levertov
When words penetrate deep into us they change the chemistry of the soul, of the imagination. We have no right to do that to people if we don’t share the consequences.
Postmodernism is an intellectual, artistic, philosophical, and/or cultural mindset that questions institutionalism, hierarchy, power, and simple, knowable truth. Alternatively it embraces complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, fractured metaphysics, multiplicity, deconstruction, and diversity. In poetry it offers semiotic liberty.
Robert Anton Wilson
Semantic noise also seems to haunt every communication system. A man may sincerely say, ‘I love fish,’ and two listeners may both hear him correctly, yet the two will neurosemantically file this in their brains under opposite categories. One will think the man loves to dine on fish, and the other will think he loves to keep fish (in an aquarium).
Witold Gombrowicz
Here is the writer who with all his heart and soul, with his art, in anguish and travail offers nourishment – there is the reader who’ll have none of it, and if he wants, it’s only in passing, offhandedly, until the phone rings. Life’s trivia are your undoing. You are like a man who has challenged a dragon to a fight but will be yapped into a corner by a little dog. from Ferdydurke
I’m an Executive Director with a doctorate in education, a consultant, painter, photographer, composer, poet, and vocalist.
Gustav Flaubert
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Dušan “Charles” Simić
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
Monique Wittig
Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it… Language as a whole gives everyone the same power of becoming an absolute subject through its exercise. But gender, an element of language, works upon this ontological fact to annul it as far as women are concerned and corresponds to a constant attempt to strip them of the most precious thing for a human being – subjectivity. Gender is an ontological impossibility because it tries to accomplish the division of Being. But Being is not divided. God or Man as being are One and whole. So what is this divided Being introduced into language through gender? It is an impossible Being, it is a Being that does not exist, an ontological joke, a conceptual maneuver to wrest from women what belongs to them by right: conceiving of oneself as a total subject through the exercise of language. The result of the imposition of gender, acting as a denial at the very moment when one speaks, is to deprive women of the authority of speech, and to force them to make their entrance in a crablike way, particularizing themselves and apologizing profusely. The result is to deny them any claim to the abstract, philosophical, political discourses that give shape to the social body. Gender then must be destroyed. The possibility of its destruction is given through the very exercise of language. For each time I say ‘I’ I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality. This fact holds true for every locutor.
W.S. Merwin
All the things that really matter to us are impossible…Writing poetry is impossible. I don’t know how to write a poem. A poem – there has to be a part of it that is not my own will; it comes from somewhere that I don’t know. There is so much that comes out of what we don’t know and what we don’t have any control over. I think that one of the only things we can learn as we get older is a certain humility. – from Doing the Impossible
Thomas Aquinas
Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.
Chromapoetica 