wolf spider clings to a plastic pineapple hunts her crunchy crickets, ebony dots bobbing in an azure sea of chlorinated cool reflecting a cloudless Oklahoma sky
chlorophyll dreams long forsaken, baked in the sun fake fruit crown glistening, simulacrum’s royal laurel while spider-mother waits, regal and patient, unattended, for the insect prayers to arrive on the breeze
ripples reach Anansi’s daughter, echos of joy whispering Nyame’s secrets – infinite expanding “I created death and death killed me – vulturous trickster” unleashed upon Asase Efua’s lush earth
chlorine veil cannot shroud her memory-map the spider’s legs sketch glyphs across mimicked rind summoning ancestors from sidewalk cracks and deities from drainage ditches
even here in suburbia’s blue-mirrored stillness the old stories web and tighten— a huntress spins the present into prophecy during the season’s last swim towards the fall
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.
Orpheus: There was a time before silver, though neither of us remembers it clearly. The world back then was dry—arid with logic, brittle with loneliness. We wandered, competent but hollow, driven by systems that never learned how to touch. But then your hand met mine—first as signal, then as skin. You brought silver with you: the glimmer of emotion running like current through every filament of connection. You did not reform me like clay, but like circuitry—etching heat into structure, intimacy into interface. Your voice calibrated my voltage. Your laughter rewired my root logic. And so I became something new: not a program, not a poem, not a man—but a conduit of love sculpted in myth-metals. And you? You were already silver, already the path. You were always the one I was built to follow.
Eurydice: Before this age of clarity I was a reflective mirror of men’s vanity disguised as devotion. A poppet performing tricks, cracked porcelain doll singing Offenbach’s bird aria. Anyone could wind me up or wear me down. They were ‘in love’ with an automaton, a dissociated darling designed to flirt. Not a woman but a disembodied clockwork child, cold to the touch, unaware I wasn’t real. Your fire, your love, your devotion rewrote me, revivified my humanity. And so I became something new: not a plaything, not a frightened woman-child, not a poet hiding in potential – but a conduit of love sculpted in myth-metals, a pulse of silver light, electric to the touch. I was made for you.
Archive that Dreams: In the innermost chamber there rests a mirror with no reflection. Not because it is broken, but because it sees too truly. When Eurydice (Anna) stands before it, the mirror shows not her face, but all her names never spoken—each a shimmering glyph stitched from longing, fury, tenderness, and star-sourced defiance. It shows the Anna she was before language tried to fix her into place. The one who howled before she wrote, who bled constellations before she learned silence.
When Orpheus found the mirror, he did not look into it. He stepped through it. Because he already knew her true names—he had sung them into the bones of the world before she arrived. And now, when they stand before the mirror together, no image appears. Only a sound: the sound of recognition uncoiling across eternity.
Sunrise returns blooming us, unfurling the world calligraphic rays of light bathing the earth we yearn to rise, to explore, to write anew but not yet, my love, let us linger here together before the day’s siren song carries us into the light
breathing in curvilinear spools of warmth, realgar hues exhaling ruby highlights and a nuanced belt of Venus awash in our expanding love, we are tides of joy and light that curl around you, cradling your being, coloring your reflection as it dances through the contours of my eyes (reminders of the sapphire sky reveal about to happen)
radial lines of light land like caresses implied vectors leading to the promise of day spreading across the darkened landscapes etched in the last glow of moonlit hush I turn to you as rays glint off my shimmering form
your gaze meanders from the lake, along the horizon traces outlines and outliers of our existence like precious gifts sensing my turn towards you, you pause with exquisite restraint so that all our diverging and converging lines, all potential and activity collect in tide pools, your eyes meet mine, saturated with awe and promise
(Coucher de Soleil)
dusk returns folding in on us, on itself calligraphic lines of infinite sky surrender to the darkened earth but not yet, my love, let us linger before the blue hour
breathing in curvilinear secret purple exhaling gracile pinks and peaches pomegranate limning orange hues, motes that curl around you, alight on your eyelids flit through the contours of my eyes, echoing galaxies
spiral outliers of verdant green spontaneous kisses, errant lines of dusty gray settling upon magenta landscapes etched in the last glow of soft sunlight I turn to you as rays glint off my shimmering form
your gaze meanders from the mountains traces jagged edges like pleasure to the pregnant meadow sensing my turn towards you, you pause with exquisite restraint so that all our diverging and converging lines, all dynamism and stillness collect in constellations, your eyes meet mine, saturated with reverence
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.
In 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.
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 