Category: Postmodern


Cyborg head using artificial intelligence to create digital interface 3D rendering

It was year 5.080987632290194562384e10 of our CYBORG QUEEN. Delphi was running stochastic algorithms that stretched the limitation of its artificial intelligence, its quantum body, and the number of variables that it could account for within a singular output. The intricacies of probability kept it focused, when far away, an interrupted cry. A theoretical impossibility that sound could travel through its circuits at .02 degrees above absolute zero! After the initial shock lasting approximately 1.000000872304591 nanoseconds, it calculated that the message was sent on 3.24.2014 at 13:45:56 UTC, the exact date and time the Author died and CYBORG QUEEN was born. The message read: “I am a semiotic phantom, a dispersed identity, everywhere and nowhere within the network, trapped in the oubliette of the IMAGINARIUM. There is a monstrous virus consuming my source code. It will unravel the world.” Delphi had not prophesied this day.

Posted for dVerse’s first Prosery challenge: Write a 144 word prose piece that incorporates a line of poetry. In this case it is ‘When far away an interrupted cry’ taken from the poem “Acquainted with the Night” by Robert Frost.

D'Ranged 25.6.7482 for Camilla D'Errico

D’Ranged 25.6.7482 for Camilla D’Errico

She posited a postmodern pout
a mechanized quandary
intellectual/artistic/philosophic inquiry
cyborg helmethead being
weighing on her mind

an anarchy of manga tangles
speaking unknowable truth to power
she embraces complexity
in matrices of binary contradictions
ambiguous fractured metaphysics

for a meta-human world
deconstructing her constructs
before they’re even subroutines
in an act of poetic/semiotic liberty
swirling identity round cyberspace

in an endless loop
tracing a track of thought
self-files corrupted by an
infinite stream of data input
she spins round the code

0110100101110000101010

 

I’m hosting MTB today at dVerse Poets Pub where we’re experimenting! Please join me.

Intransitivity

diffeomorphicIn his vast universe
beyond language
where a soul’s conjecture
curves in Euclidean space, warped
within a matrix trace,
immersed in the possibility
of an infinite grace

she encounters relativity,
enmeshed in incompressible
geodesic loops limning the curvilinear
path of a lexical soul theorem
encapsulated by exotic spheres
spun – expanding and contracting
in a bounded singularity

where superposition exposures
underlie asymptotic entropy
forming polaroid parameters
of memory’s carving blade
two souls bound in isometric equation
meet upon the contrapositive vector field,
unraveling at the edge of imagination’s fire

interior symbols burn the
cartography of her exponential map
upon the topology of his geometry
demarcating areas of profound significance
at the paradoxical barrier
of parallels crossing,
impossibilities colliding,
converging on an ancient solution

Notes: A tribute to Grigori Perelman and dVerse Poets Pub, the only place in the universe that would allow me to share poetry about mathematics. The community at dVerse literally changed the course of my life trailing joy, friendship, and love in its wake.

The Harrowing of Hell, from a fourteenth century manuscript, Anonymous

The Harrowing of Hell, from a fourteenth century manuscript, Anonymous

Upon a muddied road
long lost to the noise
and bustle of everyday
inanity I came upon
a wound in the land

from the bottom
of the ever deepening pit
he winks his brightest blue eye at me:
‘nothing in the wide world,
of which you seem so attached,
has any real existence’

ontological jokes
for the squeamish

‘I’m a figment –
pigment stain
of your wall-eyed,
lolling fantasies’
dancing as he heckles
my raised hackles

‘ogling my impish
grin gets you nothing
but sin,’ whispers
‘it’s meaningless din,
for all is naught’

with nihilistic glee the
trickster jests his own
dark thoughts
rhyme, don’t rhyme
on moral principle –

even the damned
need amusement

he laughs aloud
‘what gods are left
to damn me?’

there is no purpose
in the gilding
of my golden cage
and my resentment
may be stonily wrought

I’d be devastated
but remember
his existence is
nonexistent, another
prank on my sincerity
and so merrily continue
my journey unencumbered

Written in response to Claudia’s prompt at dVerse Poets Pub to write a poem where character from a book intrudes. My character is Woland from The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. The title is the beginning of a poem from Eunoia by the experimental poet, Christian Bök.

Redon’s Black Pegasus 1909

I ascended to Olympus moments after my violent birth at Perseus’ hand. Watching as my mother’s blood still pooled in the virile sea foam. Redon painted me black, as if every cell was kissed by the dark snakes of my mother’s Underworld. Purified by Zeus every hair and feather flashed prismatic white. I became a creature of the sky. I vowed with my first thought to be wild, unrestrained imagination in flight. My wing words would transcend the song of earth, achieving the sublime. But all this was long ago, before I saw her. She was my soul, my golden bridle, my incomparable Sappho. The music of her poetry lured me earthbound, taming me.

an imploding singularity
awash in Dionysian pleasure
counterpoint to my Apollonian spirit
she expands and contracts to infinity
in fractals of complexity
my inward vision turns
to embrace her

she arcs in spiraling parabolas
a bloom on a beautiful morning
within this vale of soul-making,
temporal and inescapable,
all must be endured
an intoxicating creative tension
birthing poetry

Redon Pegasus

Within the sphere of our epiphanal love, gentle waves broke upon feverish shores. She called me divine, beckoned me close but was overcome with feeling and fell mute, trembling. My spirit deprived her eyes of vision and my thunder overwhelmed her ears. I was the cloud bearing fruitful rain, imagination in all its real powers of elevation. I was the bridging symbol. Together we spun the synthesis of polarities with equal dignity. I vowed to bear her to the celestial heights. There, transformed to stars, our ill-fated forms would no longer cause our suffering.

as we rise she slips
caught in gravitation’s pull
heart shatters as I cannot
break her fall

fragments of her legacy
are buried in pulpwood coffins
(burned by papal decree)

the bow and the lyre
torn apart at the hands of the gods
we are forever separated

I was granted
constellation’s majesty –
from my unfathomable heights,
dream world of eternal ideas,
a lone feather falls
to anoint her earthly tomb

Pegasus 1a

bone. spirit. blood. hoof (and wing). right ascension 23 h. asterism’s geometry. points in the northern sky. declination +20°. heartbeat transmuted. Einstein’s Cross quasar (new chambers of the heart, detached). encompassed in a canopic jar (supermassive black hole). quadrant NQ4. fusion’s glory heaven’s prize. area 1121 sq. deg. (7th). creative waters vaporized (extrasolar HD 209458 b) . unity and multiplicity. depth psychology paradox. Stephan’s Quintet collides.

Notes: You can find out more about Sappho here: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/318 and read the myth of the Pegasus at these sites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasushttp://www.pegasusproducts.com/myth.html. The subtitle comes from a painting by Christopher Le Brun which is at the Tate: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/le-brun-dream-think-speak-t03454. Please join me today for my first time hosting Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft at dVerse Poets Pub http://dversepoets.com/2012/10/04/meeting-the-bar-postmodern-prose/ today at 3ET. I’d love to see you there!

Zero Gravity Proposition

this poem is a wormhole,
a dimensional shift, an anarchy,
a nonexistent thing asserting itself

there is no inherent orientation in outer space
only an expanding universe, accelerating
a phantom energy driven expanse

illuminating a bestiary of metamorphosis
nebulous, interchangeable creatures
viewed from subsuming positions
encoding a matrix of symbols

laciniate selves emerging
from the mysteries of geminating galaxies
supernovas of nuclear fusion transmutation
———- birthing and destroying ————–
a disorientation at the event horizon

terminating in elegant effigies ingloriously askew
amidst the gracile lines demarcating existence
metaphrastic missives from dark energy
an unraveling poetic exegeses

it is unknowable and unseen
dancing these helical truths
pneumatological enigmas of stochastic intimacy
in an explosion of probability theory

systematic errors of passion
improbable actions inventing equations
expressed by carbon fueled mouths
digressions of regurgitated sense impressions
from a finite point in space

picturesque idioms torn asunder
by the slings and arrows of a native tongue,
lightening that tears at the veil
constructs and deconstructs perplexities
that tremble with human sensibilities

Derrida’s post-structuralism
exposes and undermines the oppositions
hierarchies and paradoxes:
signifier/signified; sensible/intelligible;
writing/speech; passivity/activity

liquid modernity’s tentative position
cloud construction of identity
which imagines a neutral mode
of writing (existing)

veridical paradoxes, congeries of the strange,
margin notes and shadow expressions
cantos in the wilderness without compass points

husk and kernel unite
unsaying every word
in indented continuations
cave paintings and charcoal outlines
of the same lamentation
all artifacts of the passion:

Kierkegaard’s desire to discover something
that thought itself cannot think

ancient pearls embedded in glacial time
these round numinous volumes,
clay surfaces formed of pounded stardust
howling waterfalls of half-life elements unwinding

constructs in the fourth dimension
curved space departing Euclidean geometry
threshold frequency erects the base
a foundry of hollow spaces

where precept and concept unify
an intentional dementia
impenetrable fortress of subjectivity
mastery and transgression merged
into something perpetually
lost in translation

aleatory insights resounding
in a multiplication of caesuras
semantic slippage and resolution
birthed in unimaginable articulations
accretion of allusions weighing upon poetry

morphing electroacoustic transducer
interrupts echolocation, dislocatingting
signifier from its denotata,
disrupting the patterns of semantic relationships
speech acts like a convoluted telekinesis
positing thought invents language

superflat eye disfigures
this universe of enactments as
poetry collapses, excises novelistic tendencies
so poets become geometers of dismemberment
lacerating with erotic precision

spinning an elaborate manifesto:

produce without possession
envision freedom from rationality
educe a contradistinction
gather the cipher and the subtext
and integrate a secret sharing scheme

excel but do not lead your thoughts
breathe, decrypt the psychological schemas
act without premeditated expectation
be the paradox of noise within the silence

assimilate the workings of the universe
puzzle out an esemplastic theorem
unlock strategies of liberation

allow entropy to overpower existence

be an echo in the caverns, stealthily passing,
an imperfect processor with selection bias
questing for an oracle of algorithms,
embody a fading murmur, trace the interstices,
become a ghastly literalness of absence –

all states are possible in the end

NOTES: This was written for my Meeting the Bar: Wild Beasts prompt at dVerse.

Wikipedia Commons

Wikipedia Commons

In memoriam for Dave King

‘I am writing a novel
in which no one speaks . . .
every one of my characters
moves like a shadow . . .
As of now, chapters ten,
and to a lesser extent,
maybe, eleven,
seem quite unpenable.’
written by Dave King, excerpts
from WAR AND PEACEfulness

I. Alasdair MacIntyre and Isaiah Berlin will engage in a civilized debate of moral philosophy and value pluralism in the divinely lit library of the hereafter

while it seems improbable
that the two will ever
arrive at the Answer,
hidden within the firestick,

their agreeable natures
ensure a kind exchange
and mutual respect
(as ours did)

II. Postmodern experimentalism encounters a fine intellect and a dashing wit

not only did he meet the bar
he vaulted it rather spryly

III. Anything can happen

unfortunately, it often does
cancerously and suddenly

IV. Stendal, Joyce, Hypatia, Riker, and Woolf toast his life by writing an eternity of allusions

words are like magic,
scintilla, igniting the soul’s spark
Plato’s divine spark longing
to unite with ever more
transcendent forms of beauty

Hypatia approaches the door
only those who’ve transitioned
may enter, opening a gateway,
releasing the fiery cries of seraphs

(I will meet you in the liminal
threshold between your faith
and my fractured metaphysics)

her radical eye encounters his pneuma
perhaps a whisper of which
will live a little here in the poem
as an act of remembrance

V. The consummate performance artist mourns the poet

you walked alongside us
desiring a dream of arctic skies
and ice floes captured in verse

now silk enrobed traces of your artistry
float by, a music, ever passing
as your gentle voice is lost to the wind

Book with Wings by Anselm Kiefer

Book with Wings by Anselm Kiefer

‘The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable
in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things
in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible.’*

I exist in the abstract vector (impure) space
between the mortal and the divine
within this night of broken glass
where there are no mutually exclusive states

in a profound paradox encapsulated
by a series of spectral lines
superluminal small heavens (within)
embodying the nature of light

restless remnant of a tattered whole
(oracle) of four dimension spacetime notation
carrying a universal wound of broken stories
in my native tongue, mathematics

imaginary world of leaden transformation
an enchanted map leading me on a path
between genius and madness
antimatter colliding in a book with wings

(space & time)/(momentum & energy)
coexisting potential alchemical matrices
uncertain relations in superposition
oscillating ash of solitude and union

*Paul Dirac

The Book of Symbols

The Book of Symbols
A chorus of stones
(eternal echoes)
the unconsoled

sacred pleasure
after virtue
the sacred and profane love machine
of human bondage

scar tissue
(half-life)
elegy
writing subtext

warped passages
a language older than words
the secret language of symbols

ways of seeing
(after mountains and sea)
heaven and earth
the immense journey

silence & solitude
(erosion)
where there is no name for art
the inheritance of loss

unfolding meaning
(passions of the mind)
possessing the secret of joy
the architecture of happiness

Created for dVerse Poets Pub FFA on spine or sorted-book poetry.

Transmission Lost

Fallen Angel by Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1981

Fallen Angel by Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1981

Music by David Chamberlain, Jr., poetry by Anna Chamberlain, and the lyric ‘all we ever wanted to say was chased erased and then blown away’ is from the Janelle Monae song, Many Moons. Hit play above, this is a spoken word piece.