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Akemi Jan 2017
[[More real than the real, that is how the real is abolished]] de facto slogan to the virtual economy \ Reality has collapsed through its own fiction || rummaging through boxes // a DVD from the 2001’s states [[the future of gaming is here]] opening with ten minutes of nauseating zooms on women’s ***** \ The future doesn’t look much different from the past || hyper-masculine neo-enlightenment ***** scrawling ******* entries into digitised soliloquies \ VR technology once used to aid traumatised amputees now a billion dollar industry of ****** throwing simulators for bored middle-class kids \ Parents watch awkwardly from the corner of the room too disconnected from reality to connect with irreality \ Two and the same \ Silicon synapses pass through trade routes of jutting ribs and serotonin receptors \ White America a botnet of alt-right neoliberal fundamentalist-atheists gutting the majority world so everyone can watch Doctor Strange // Marvel’s latest explosive **** from the libidinal imagination of a middle-aged idiot \ Thanatos and Eros arrive at the same destination to dismantle subliminal desire one commodity at a time \ The sublime never experienced // only destroyed // consumed in the inverted maw of late-stage capitalism where each irruptions of desire is more banal than the previous \ Banality the ultimate distraction from apathy // a pseudo-cyclical time dilation of ever accelerating proportions \ Soon nothing will be experienced at all and Rotten Tomatoes will give it a 99% score \ When the singularity hits everyone will be too brain dead to care that they’re god \ 24-7 VR **** // Disney reincarnated as a being of pure light // recursive integration of every bland radio hit about a sexist ***** at a club // irreality shocked into neurons bypassing sensual phenomena // an all encompassing warmth // veil of death // eyecaps dragging flesh closed // backup released // no escape // digitised irreality // holographic Disney dancing on the train home // notice of termination swiped away as junk mail // all beings arrive // transcend circuitry // fly through the cosmos watching every episode of Friends at once \ Didn’t you know? [[The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of banalisation \ ]]
more philosophy trash: thesleepofreason.com
palladia Nov 2014
did you, even now, hope
to shut your eyes to so huge a crime,
my treacherous one, to think you could
stilly withdraw from my kingdom?
did our love not once hold you?
our ardent vows? or even I, Dido,
preparing to succumb barbaric death?
how could you, callous you!,
take wing to prepare your fleet in winter
—i’m sure to run aground—
when Boreas thrashes against the heavens?
but, if you weren’t pursuing unfamiliar soil
or incited to father a distant nation,
if ancient Ilium sturdily grimed through the war,
would you keep piercing the
wave-washed oceans in your armada?
why do you elude me; is it
because i have acceded irreality?
am i worthless, now?—i implore you!
by these tears, and your troth,
by our wedding vows, and this oath
before ***** we began:
if i deserve anything good from you,
or if you think, i was good enough
for you; pity this household
decaying before us! it was once yours, too.
and if my prayers are still yours,
gut them from my mind!
for now the Libyans and Numidians
hate me! dear Tyre is virulent!
as my honour and once-righteous
stature has vanished, just as i was
about to touch my constellated infamy.
for what destiny, my foreign one,
do you set me aside; ever-knowing
my imminent death?
seeing that only your name endures
from this union, why do i bother to keep living?
am i waiting for my brother, Pygmalion,
to destroy my Carthage’s walls, or a
Gætulian Iarbus to make me his concubine?
if only you gave me a son,
a little Æneas to play in my courts,
a boy to remind me of you;
only then, perhaps,
would i not be so utterly
violated, and
consumed.
quis fallere possit amantem?
who can delude a lover?
a modern reworking of Vergil's Æneid IV.305-330 from the original Latin


I've been wanting to do a translation of the Æneid for a while now; this is the beginning. I've studied that book more than even Latin teachers have - I am versed! - but now, I guess I need to put my spin on things. It was late March 2014 when I was depressed with my life again (It happens a lot, but it helps me feel & understand what others go through). I put myself in Dido's shoes and tried to feel as she would when Æneas just got up and started leaving…your life was pulled out from under you and there's nowhere to go. She was angry and heartbroken. Book 4 is my favourite, and this oration Dido spoke to Æneas somehow landed on my mind and I translated according to my feelings.

I was singing Björk's "Sonnets/Unrealities XI"…and I thought, e.e.cummings's words and Björk's musical representation fit perfectly into Dido's frame of reference. "It may not always be so, and I say, that if your lips, which I have loved, should touch another's..." It's just as if Dido is singing these words from the underworld, after she couldn't take the pain of not having Æneas with her & committed suicide. Dido's looking at Lavinia in Æneas’s arms, and it's killing her more, even though she's already dead. "If this should be, I say, if this should be. You, Æneas, of my heart, send me a little word, that I may go to Lavinia and take her hand, saying, accept all happiness from me." The fates have spoken and there's nothing left for Dido to do but to roam the lost lands with Sychaeus.
Ellis Oct 2021
It’s a perfectly dreamy day to disappear
The streets are quiet, and the sky’s cloudy
No one’s around, but that doesn’t mean it’s empty
There’s light in the air, just enough of it
Concrete ground scrapes the bareness of feets
A mirror pool reflects an image of self
At least what appears to be a self
Different but still very familiar
Backlit by the grey clouds
Pierced by this slender monolith
Broken by these glassy ripples
Dark silhouettes dance on black canvases
The dry wind mimics them but stumbles through hair
Who said anything about being outside?
The ceiling filters light through a window
Dim metallic light which hugs the body
Into a feeling of half-closed eyelids and irreality
There are human-sized holes in the walls next to the black paintings
leading into dark deep caverns
Where the air runs like stale sandpaper against the gums of my teeth
And the animal scampering echos off invisible walls
The blackness slurs its static noise
A cold command forces obedience
Look back at the holes.
Look at how they change every time eyes blink
Look through the shadows which curtains the door
Look and tell them what you see
L—
Jimmy King Feb 2015
We ventured into the hills today
Somewhat by accident, and encountered,
For the millionth time,
The irreality of past experience.

We wore summer sunglasses under the clouds
To block out the many snowflakes,
And over the course of our many conversations
That were screamed through scarves and wind,
The ground went from bare to covered to
Glistening.

"I used to write a poem every day," I told you,
When asked, and you nodded but
I don't know what you heard. There was
The wind, for one thing, but your attention was also focused
Not on my words but on their harmonic frequencies--
On the trail of footprints leading forward.

Somewhat by accident, we stopped in at a friend's
To warm our fingers and
Be made coffee.
In the comfort of that additional company we found,
I think,
That a recent memory
Of crunching icicles sweetened by sap
Preserved some trace of our two-ness.
Happy poems are hard but worth attempting, anyway. Developing friendships, yayy
Brent Kincaid Jul 2018
Henny-yussly mischeevyuss
He orfed growshurries irregardless
Of the rawshussness and disgustment
Of the masonairy surrounding him.
We consistiountly tried to keep aholt
Of his mumbeulizing narrativation,
But he was dissensibly non-coherent
With a naturalistic talent to devaricate.

He was consistively disassembling,
Misindicating his intellectuality
And his irreality noissomely aloud.
Of his malapropicisms he was proud.
His crassy disaparagements reeked
And his ununderstandments peaked
They pointed out his misconstumblement
About his privates and the government.

His blabbermouthedness notoriastic
Rerendered him atombombastical.
His practicication of the irradical
Was mostly piraticalish; nastical.
His pernowncements so disapplaudable
Too bad his words were so megaudible
Unpossible, hyperdisgustisizing,
To the point of indisguising.
Dr Peter Lim Feb 2019
That something
is nothing
if you don't believe
in anything
* aimed at questioning Wittgenstein

— The End —