Writing a poem is about locating self.
Every facet within what you’re about to create
blooms from your consciousness, your subconsciousness
your ego, your mind, your heart

But where are those elements planted?
Where are they rooted?

They are rooted within:

your ethnocentric illusions
your lived reality
your privilege, your pleasure, your pain
your abilities, your disabilities
your socioeconomic status: have and/or havenot
your fluency, your empathy, your sense of humour
your vices and your storytelling devices

Now we've got some roots, what are we going to grow?
Let’s begin by observing, using our senses
Maybe, let’s use our eyes
Consider, the reality of how we see and sense the world
Is different for each and every one of us

Everything is tempered by the lens we use
Which is informed through the roots of our synapses
Which empirically flow from the subjective ground
On which we stand

And what does this have to do with poetry?
What you describe in your poem,
Is an interpretation of what you see (and feel)

Interesting poetry comes when
there is exploring to do
It is a poet’s imperative to
Explore the edges
Out past the boundaries of the visual and audible spectrum

If we were fish poet’s
Would we write poetry about water?

I like to toy with my teenagers on occasion
So I asked my son the other day, what his worldview was?
And I have been enjoying the vacuous silence ever since
To be fair, I have been asking myself the same question for many years
And this might have been the inciting incident leading me to storytelling

As we began this journey together, it was stated that
Writing a poem is about locating self.
Can you describe your context?

Let me attempt to describe mine:

Here I am on the stage in this ocean of air
At the Owl Acoustic Lounge
On a Wednesday night in May
Popping air with rhythm, nuance, and a certain je ne ce quoi

Although this poem is not objectively true
Let me attempt to share that
this poem blooms from my developing cosmology
From the overtures of my Overself;
from the undercurrents of the Monomyth,
From my ***** and through my groans of intercession
This poem blooms from oblivion
Threading through philosophy, to worldview, and into a budding cosmology

For myself:
Worldview fell away when I found cosmology while reconnecting with the night sky
That night sky took me places while grounding me concurrently in inner spaces
Where locating self flows into meta-cognitive health,
Well ... that is something to write about

educating man is such a fakery...
consistent:
     with an individual bypassing
it: and a mass unit
succumbing to it...
                problem with
the mass unit:
                          when hearing
the negativity behind what was being
sold is actually pointless:
starts making sense?
well how am i not to cringe?
       who is to spew truths...
                       akin to maxims...
if maxims are previously unobserved
and untested "circumstances"...
then again... maybe that's better...
akin to la roccafauld (almost a googlewhack,
3 results)...
          it's not dyslexic of me...
i was thinking of nietzsche and
   la rochefoucauld...
               who weren't as much
interested in facts...
           but stating new observations...
after all: how tiresome it must be...
to defend facts...
        to champion "objectivity"...
having it exhaust your subjective
       experience...
              after all, on the basic observation:
i am a potential of being
an object of gravity...
        but, unless i don't want to walk
off a cliff... i am granted the a priori
reality, of being a subject,
of gravity... i can "test" this by throwing
a stone into the air...
   objectivity and its defence,
this desire to be the guardian of facts
is exhausting...

   mind you... why are the asians so
good at graphics?
       oh...       (gyo( )砕)....
                                   gyokusai...
imagine writing this...
                    why are the asians so good
at graphics?
            who would ever need to build
the great wall of china,
if not to prevent the mongols,
when, your language,
    is a defence system in itself?
what do i have? the language of exploration...
an omicron to peer through...
                   and find new ambitions...

   i always find that the medieval artists
were not benevolent in the depiction
of noblewomen...
        they all, rather, seem... ******...
they were not benevolent to the women
of high birth...
      then again...
what if any advances am i to mention?

at least a "poet" can translate a history
book,
        into the modern 21st century parlance...
citing as many sources as he can...
the free and open library...
         once in a while citing
a bibliography-esque ref. to a video...
or a word...
                      a freedom never before
granted...
         bypassing the scrutiny of editors...
akin to something
resembling a youtube(.com) glitch,
of what the old jukebox resembled...

       band - album

   papir - IV
                       mythic sunship - land between rivers
electric orange - netto
                 do make say think - winter hymn
                         country hymn secret hymn
        (more like, think, don't say,
                           do whatever you can make of "it" -
no that's just an interjection)...
          java - interstellar translator,
       my brother the wind - twilight in the crystal
cabinet,
      valley of the sun - old gods,
    yob - adrift in the ocean,
          stone rebel - soul shelter,
   son cesaro - submerge,
           space fox - moon trips,
                 monomyth - further,
          the outsider - hyeon,
      iah - iah,
                    echobasement - no form of hu...
     Øresund space collective -
              hallucinations inside the...

hell, i only really wanted to play the sort
of high fidelity role of working
in a music shop...
             i guess... the best i can do...
is forage new music, even i haven't heard
of... not exactly john peel:
but close enough...
    it's not like any of this music would
be played on mainstream radio...
   (a) no vocals
   (b) prog rock complexity...
              if you can sit through listening to
the, whole album netto by electric orange...
and not be tempted to skip,
ot return to the beginning...
                mind you... that's training ground...
for you then moving to spend a good
month's worth on a historical novel...
because, frankly?
       a philosophy book requires
a good year, if not more,
      and, most probably...
           a few books in between...
you don't want to read a philosophy book
like a novel, like looking at a waterfall...
in order to then "lecture" someone on it
and condensing it into a skeleton of schematics
like those old-school game
walkthroughs / cheat books for
final fantasy VII... (homework,
****, and it's sunny and it's England...
you want to go to the shopping mall
with your misfit friends,
  and then run up to the top of the car park
and spit on people from the roof...
and, somehow time it so well
that you nail a zeppelin drop, d'uh!)...

   well it's not out of ridicule...
   but didn't nietzsche spawn the h'american
comic culture?
    comic as in a comedy of
a concept in its genesis as the übermensch?
it's a perfectly reasonable observation...
bat-man,
      over-man,
                       spider-man,
           blah blah...
                     at first it must have been
a tactic to ridicule **** philosophy...
               after all... mickey mouse?
                   why wouldn't the comic book culture
         not directly stem from a ridicule
of the übermensch idea?
                  hence the need to find it all the more
ridiculous, by diluting it,
increasing the noise to a mass furore...
    if over-man,
    then what? man-spider,
  man-robot...
               man-bat... man-water...
     what was so potent in overcoming man,
instilled in the german drive of that period...
that required the h'americans to ridicule it,
make comic books out of it?
               well... one thing is for sure...
people are sick of this diluting process...
     an idea that is without form,
   without an image,
                  but only the skeleton of the spelling...
has become overtly-saturated with
   phantasmagoria that never materializes!

i swear i was supposed to write something
else... ah!
     i remember these two stories that were
fed to the english press from russia...
a few months after i returned from st. petersburg
(i will stand to my convictions,
not even st. petersburg can compete
with the aura associated with either paris,
or edinburgh... moscow is just a concrete
******* behemoth, it's bloated in arrogance
of its own presence and dominion,
st. petersburg could have competed,
but it can never out-compete either paris
or edinburgh)...

             the two stories?
(1) two men were having an argument about
the philosophy of Kant,
              one of the men shot the other man
in a grocery store;
    (2) two men were having an argument about
whether prose was superior to poetry,
or whether poetry was superior to prose...
again, one of the men killed the other one...

   such coincidences...
               oh i'm not saying that was "me"...
  even i'm not that deluded...
             but it's funny to find stories about
kindred souls...
                       a good 2 years,
spent on reading the critique of pure reason,
with a decent amount of books in between...
mind you...
   it's smooth sailing, almost like a william
burroughs novel, reaching:
  the methodology of transcendence...
and believe me...
    you need a 2 vol. edition...
                    i once tried reading a 2 vol.
edition of À la recherche du temps perdu...
impossible... i'd rather go and replace
Sisyphus for the time it would have taken me,
or, replace Atlas for a day...
a 1 vol. edition of Don Quixote is bad enough,
but doable... (spoiler...
   that famous windmill scene?
                               maybe 50 pages in)...

**** me, how things have changed...
back in the day we'd start off
                         gagging for the next R. L. Stein
novel in primary school...
            night of the living dummy...
attack of the mutant...
   whatever YA is these days...
YA for me would be something akin
to Stendhal, or Alexander Dumas...
                        Dante...
                       that was YA...
   i really don't know why i didn't jump
on the Stephen King train...
                       that just flew past my head...        
maybe because of all the film adaptations...
it's like the lord of the rings...
   how am i supposed to read that book...
when... i went to see the fellowship of the ring...
7 ******* times to the cinema!
         the other movies? just once.
       it's like this family friend...
       27 times, to the cinema,
                  to binge on: enter the dragon...    
thank god i'm not a stalker-type...
              my obsessions lie elsewhere... phew!