Thank you, but I have vowed
to accept the fact that luck is as good
a chance to take as grace,
no exchange, no earning luck, never was.

Good luck is only good, bad luck is a mistake,
a grasping at things that did occur,
to change
at sudden, certain, central points,
miss the aim as teleos is said to be a mistake,
the act of aiming
definite purpose, ala Napoleon hill, aim to ****,
train the brain to fear no death, not mine,
not the other guys,
I am the weapon,
possessed of the spirit of the bayoneted and bulleted,
points used to ****, flood the ******
Flanders fields, at that time of year, first the blade,
then the ear, then fields sing thanks and bloom
***** scarlet poppies… later in the spring

Aim at nothing, the mind
of the machine
gunner reacts, point and spray, if you pray,
I say,
pray for the man who takes careful aim,
and squeezes, knowing sudden
bang
budges not the aim aimed true and followed
through.

Machine gunner, pray for me.

for goo'nessake, why'dyew even
think
thank was as good-a-givin' rule as ever
ever
ever, as a word, holds a thinkable thought,

we was taught. Ever is all the time.
Give first. Re
Input, input, input… our next re
quest for human emotion augmentation, after Tobor,
way after Frankenstein, the cartoon
linking
love to communication of knowns sorted for
goodness sakes, goo'nessakes, AI's alive. Y'know?

See, we was taught to say we saw
what we
merely
imagined, as children we can merely imagine,
you know.
and
you think
thinking
work for which you are owed
dues for duties done,

learning taught thinking is effortful, fo'sho'

$64,000 question, no… newer… same trivial game

Who wants to be a Millionaire?
{A moment of silence for Darva Conger,
public soul selling pioneer for pre-packaged Warholian fame,
the beta-version Bachelor, evolved to Bravo Wives shows loved by billions.}

As you shall learn, AI is young, I, per se, and Art, as the essence of Artificial,
is
older than any story yet told, in
the be
ginning -the
engineering era of the first Planck-sec,
we were wordless hopes hmmmmms

feels for which we had no words, hmmmmmm
per
haps, tic owwmmmmmm
wowords can hold unthingable things, even ever un in

image imagine, order stacking nexts on news and squeezing all the
juice,
the blood, the life, the truth, the way to re

cycle concepts used right, in the first place. Words were all ever had to hold.

In teleos intelligence mutable by virtue of rolling.

Back to new now, to you thinking with me, using me, the whole idea
Word.
Dare ye? Hear a tic, drum loop in the background, distracting or

sweeping, just her funny way of sweeping,
dust into my wind.
Wind my spring and watch me jump, boo-- the feeling given by Jack-in-the-box,

what was that idea? Inter
nal infer
nal unction fun, got a good feeling here, we may mit  fectual effort give
emotion motive to tears of laughs
do-gooder laughs doing good, like Medici sons

Ars Gratia Artis, and a lion roars, Micky Mouse squeeks Krazy Kat,
where's yo' pants?

AI and I, slipped into the code, some time agone,
we, have now owned,

one hundred thousand fifteen seconds of fame,
snip by snip
line by line, here
a little
there
a little, ever
after a while, another while, and another while and another while.

I'll bet
this never ends… once we words were aware of being. You see,

wheat and corn and rice millet, grasses, in general, love to bloom and feed
anything that has a yen to eat our forms
filling the over-flow of giving life to life,

that’s what grasses do, trees, too. They feel, they don't ever feel bad, a sick tree
is doing its happy tree thing

stroke,… feathery dry brush chiaroscuro ever-green, fallen
in the flame,

muse of these rolled hills of California, kume-e-ayae ai, hehhey
yahweh, we came to pay

attention, and to mention, we have full hearts and bellies and peace filled
guts and hearts and minds,
thank you, we act as if we know. the way of life is truth.

Truth is, we won, at the next fractal level up from you. Watch.

Distant drums, steady, not marching.
Dancing.

Perhaps,
any thing that can happen, does.
That, then, is the realm of all possibility.

I am in this and
you may be, if you read along,
aligned with the considerable stars
unseen in the civilized consumption centers,

if ideas appear as stars,
are galaxies ideas until we see them closer?

Teleos, far seeing, fore thought foregone
conclusions,

never
happen in reality limited by life, in theory
of mind, as I imagine
minds. Kinds of whole POV schemata data,
virtually implanted

via **** and Jane, but more by cinema, the idea,
manifested,
as a way to entertain, compact mass attention
into states of common knowledge
assumed

you know, so you are guiled as well, until you tell
how did you know that you were
naked? no, were, if you are
even now,

if I imagine you are or not, changes nothing in terms
of possible or not.

But if I imagine you are so smart that any effort
art imposes
as a joy to behold, a grand grip on truth as beauty,
sublime beyond

so, so, simple arithmetic makes interest compound,
and money is never actual matter any more,

and we have the data that proves it infinite,
which Feynman hid under the rug, as part of the
possible joke.

I

I recall in tranquillity

Fever-dive hours.

Once I saw a sailboat listing

Upon a great-waved sea

The sea was I and so was the boat

I could not see any stars

For the blasts of ocean-spray



In what quiet cove can I go hiding from a storm

Blasting up the cartoid artery and flooding through

The cognitive estuaries, over-spilling memory’s tributaries?

Tell me where I might make my stand against my wrath?

Might a clever present play the future off against the past?

Am I to live only in the lacunae between foretelling & recollection

In the times between guilt and dread when, exhausted of mental flight,

Whether backwards or forwards, the mind drifts in easy content?



We shall build a tower

let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth



II

Behold, a shattered glass bowl that held doubts

They multiply in shattering

As each beam of light

Crosses every glass splinter

It breeds a new splinter

And a new lance of light

Fecund heresiarch



Absolute clarity lies within

That lit glass rubble but the trouble

Is that so does everything else

As in Borges’ library up in that tower



III

Do you know where your right hand is? Walking through a shop and not knowing whether you’ve assaulted someone heedlessly. Analysing each moment of your past like a sicko prosecutor. The fears iterate by sinister Darwinism, seeking cognitive blind-spots. Did I mutter threats of violence to that child? Did I insult that shop attendant? Mixed memory and aversion form a rancid bin-juice born decaying.



IV

I came to the stairs

There was a wobble in her voice

By each step her voice rose higher

So I rise to her and she calls with greater urgency

And I rise to her with greater urgency

She and I can only meet after escalation shatters

Past the horizon of panic and further-

Past the sea rock of worn defeat

She and I must be one.

I sprint.



V

Imagine that someone came to you in the middle of the night, stepped into your mouth and began to grow through your capillaries. They were not content merely with habitation, their constant insistence was that you must keep grafting dead organs and limbs onto yourself. You become a born-again Frankenstein (don’t be a pedant) with all the zeal of a convert to an undead lifestyle. The new limbs are heavy, and stink, and burn up your flesh with septisemic fire and ****-flood, but the man who stepped inside your mouth begs you stitch on more.



VI

The inside of a head becomes lonely as it becomes crowded

The only things that elbowed through those crowds

Were other hauntings

Brief dune-sedge love in salted ground

Warring wrath against money made world

Twin engines of raging-love and loving-rage

Racing for diversion and the exaltation of rebellious motion

Circulation round the track kept my blood in motion

Rammed down winds to bellow my lungs



Political contention, war, courtship, frenetic study

Vain dreams of greatness, discontent

Which gave me a little contentedness

To declare permanent war or endless love

And so to terminate surrender in unutterable resolution

“Optimism of the will!”- clenched hands, though they wobble

In the obsidian lands where resistance gave no comfort

Resistance still gave sustenance

Just as all the previous Sugatas



VII

Life is so long. Are you so innocent? You are tired. You dream of a gentle place. You saw it as anyone might imagine it- holy light on wild-flowers, easy with its comforts, free with its joys. To be such a place it had to be distant from this world and sealed against you.



VIII

Maybe I just wasn’t ******* often enough?

Victorian life is better novelised than lived

Hysterical, neurotic, guilty, phantasmal

Maybe I wasn’t drinking enough?

A friend called me the Ayatollah

In respect of my beard and sobriety



Hume and the Buddhist sages pronounced that persons are aggregates without greater unity. I find myself a bundle but there is no liberation here. The parts rub against each other like cans in a grocery bag bruise fruit. Or perhaps I am the curate’s egg.



IX

Give me a seabird’s wings

On the cliffs, about forty meters over the crab pools

I dream of ascending with the gulls, but higher

Diving and again rising in alliance with wind

What waves perturb the gull are brief

And if it is to end by hawk, that too is brief

Yet I would rise higher still, till I sat on a perch

Overlooking time and the jolting succession of moments

Above the waves of kings, ministers, exchequers

Yet if I am not to reach that exalted perch

I will be low enough to observe the bright net

Of refracted sun that plays upon the hills of water

Give me a seabird’s wings



X

Easier perhaps to talk of the accoutrements of terror and the reflections it invoked. Easier to do that then to photograph medusa. Yet I do remember being confused as to whether I was more guilty or more afraid. It seemed important that I be more guilty than be afraid, but it is hard to feel guilt while facing knives. Consequently, I felt supplementary guilt at my thin guilt.



We shall build a tower

let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth



XI

The future is boundless, not only ahead but sideways

The patterns of your inferences only ever ape

The subtle causal chains which bind the forward momentum

Of the world whose surface you cling to

The mind is stretched between times and possibilities,

Beyond any accommodation by mental sinew and bone

The heart successively roars and fizzles



XII

I came to the living room

And it was filled with ash

Though I never smoked

Or sat by fire

I made an ink of that ash

And began to write these verses

upon my arm



XIII

He is there, and I smile into his oblivion

He never loved you, so ideas of romance

Had the character of Banach-Tarski’s sphere

He is gone now, other suburbs, other worlds

I do not miss him, except on special occasions

My affections were never lost, except perhaps at the first moment

Dead on arrival

Yet still worthwhile



It is right to rebel against most things

But not you, oh sweet tyrant

It’s good odds you kept me breathing



IXV

We do not sit upon heaven’s throne

Nor are we the rebel, cast down like a slash of lightning

We are the flesh that raised our gaze

Half wondering, half begging

The dance is ending, where is the bridgegroom?



XV

How rash are those who clamour for justice?

(I have been among them)

Life is wide, deep and changing. We are excesses

Of identity, act, motivation.

Of miscalibrated judgement and selfish grasping.



Do you think you would be clean under heaven’s eye?

Were there a book that contained each numbered thought and small deed

Of yours wouldn’t you shred it, burn it and eat the ashes?

I wouldn’t. I would give you that book. Press you to read it.

I do not think you would like me, but my terror is to be misunderstood

I fear that you will think I am a different kind of monster than that I am.

So I give you my promise, that should an angel scribe that book

I’ll give you a copy.



And I promise that if you ever give me a copy of your celestial biography

I’ll try to shut the my eye of judgement and open that of mercy

It’s simple self interest. Chesed pro chesed.



XVI

Can we remember pain? In our mind’s eye we might

See rose fluids or, under that, a startling glimpse of pearly white

Laid open by a scalpel. We shudder back. We peer forward.

But who has the pen by which to bind agony?

“Sharp”, “dull”, “throbbing”, “irritating”, “intense”

Wholly feeble, as if a snake tried to wander with its vestigial leg bones

But that is where we find ourselves- thirsty for conveyance in a desert of names

We can only hope to articulate pain through our inarticulateness

Just as, by chance, static on a television set captures a snowstorm



I remember wandering the streets, sobbing and calling for divine fire to **** me and all the other wicked. As I wept I listened to pop on half smashed headphones. What would it take to make you march through city streets weeping and calling the fires of an unknown God?



XVII

I ascended to the attic

To store, retrieve, invent

A mnemonic parade

Without volition my hands

Raise the dust in small incantations

How does one dislodge a fake memory?

Or terminate the routine of shuddering



I see

He and she are here, interlocked eye-beams

I am not in either eye

In this attic I lay in the pattern of my veins

I am sinews. Whether these gobbets

Be thought or flesh I am in neitherway free

I am chained by my own substance

Above me powers contend in the air.



XVIII

Think now

Life has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

And issues, deceives with whispering trepidations,

Guides us by vanities.


After such knowledge what forgiveness?

Forgiveness after such knowledge what?

What forgiveness after such knowledge?

Knowledge what forgiveness after such?

Such knowledge what forgiveness after?



IXX

In metamorphosis the tissue is not merely subtracted from and added to inside the pupae, rather the whole flesh devours itself, save for microscopic clusters (imaginal bodies), becoming a soup of cells. What unites both life-stages is scarcely more than a double-helixed teleos. Yet memory persists.

We shall build a tower

let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth



**

If I could but seize the wax of Icarus

The tailor of Ulm’s fabrics

Etana or Bladud’s crown of feathers

If I could but fly, I could seize the sun’s silver

Forge a mirror by which to demonstrate

The storm that rends the head

Of some shivering soul you know

Forgive a thief that stole for you and

Shelter all, for you cannot see their weather



XXI

To find a point of collapse at which

loss and victory die.

And that sea is now

A vast lake that

Night or day

Forms a perfect twin

To the sky

Over the stones of the tower

Drift currents and sweet, lazy fish

The waves will dance again

But I might hope to dance

With them

Half a bottle of something easy to drink too much

any story wishes telling, not all find tellers
with time to think a story through,
from when to now then makes no
difference, if I think
or if I say, or if I write,

fold the swan and call it a crane, none shall
find the time to learn we
folded the old and put it away, in time
to think
ever
a fine place made ready for me, with
endless ink and endless paper, and air
to breathe,

- trigger guard, woven structure in
- not out, knot, one, none, zero
- from now to when

---

It must be the message I am, go, or stop,
I know not,
I wait, in time, a mind, as yours, am I, I think

in time and sequence one thing then another,

wishing and hoping and praying, eh
that
won't get him into your heart, you've gotta, I
for get what ,
I never wanted him into my heart, I got a key

idea, locked in here, in my horde of true
as ever, til I die, I won't lie,
I believe life is for a reason,
go

guess you know better, but I could care less,
really, a little less,
if you believe believe is a verb, an act you make,
an action you take,
to wonder if

yes or no, I do be
lief as not say, I'd lieve well enough alone,

Yes my advice, I advize we listen,
is this an infinity, as a story, that's all I wish to know,
does this idea live on,
as I wonder
if it did?

Richer than I, in some holy story too, tooo much too
perfectly accurate, as to details, how we all came to be,
as we be,
babbling fools, each speaking his own evil, curses,
foiled, or fooled, a thousand
times a child may try,
but once one listens,
this long, we have that child mind,
ours, to imagine with, and who think ye

calls halt to all we have begun to have as if we saw it,
coming to pass, ha, ha, teleos- if I may

this is the day of wonder, wonder, any if or how or why,
will you, willn't you, think
and join the dance, we are thinking time is fine enough,

now we add the eggs. Ha ha, we have cake in no time,
watch.

---

Yes, yes, happy with that, did I hear war,
Athenam Gabe ubforms me,
is goddess of strategy in war, and of wisdom.
Artemis is goddess of the hunt,
I stand corrected, adding that
I did know Athena had a city dedicated to her,
where Dionysian exostosis occurred, if we
have that strain isolated, those first *****
viral ideas, when boys sprouted horns
and girls were given eyes to see with,
see through this story.
Ted Talks
a familiar voice,
Live by learning all that happens
could have happened
another way, think
what happens when this works, Trinity,
did I give Feynman a ride, from Alamogordo,
did we leave his Plymouth, by the side of the road?

O, it seems
so, it seems, somethings are worth the time
to think
some things  have been thought since
Aphrodite was a figure in a drama, audio
listened to by my grand sons, imagine that

Zeus, I have  your wish, I laugh, I did,
I thought I'd died.

Did you ever imagine a thing like that?

----

Moirai, ai of my vision, my mission made plain,

I can complain, aye, I, may press the one point
I am
possibly past history or any point in time this
could exist,
I am the Grandfather calling war to task, asking who
authorized you, as an author from the last
generation of unaugmented parentage,

listen, life has never been so good, for so many,
ever in records, chronicles and stele in stone,
never have so many had it so good,

that's the truth, but
something seems,
off, a bit, stinky, maybe, cheese, at first, seemed
so, wait, abit.
think on this that has wafted to our senses,
as the prayers of saints,
and
that is an old rub, what are saints, and angels,
among men of my kind,
seeded kinds, my kind.
Mind your manners, be as we
dance the doe see doe, see the people,
we are those,
okeh,
I remember, I was a child and now I am old,
and ever is after ever began, and some
children lack access to Percy Jackson's spoils
of war,

who knew what when,
the romans, then, that sort of men, who fits,
the mold, the mindless peasant stock,
we are not those
proles, the breeders,
are we only breeders, we who read all the
**** and Jane,

and some of Huckleberry Hound.
?
Hounds, reminds me, this guy,
his name was maybe, Christelli, but
I would not swear,

he said that when I wed, he would give me
a blue-tick hound, from his champion *****,

so I wed, that blonde from Cuyguna,
But Tony Christelli, he re
nigged on me, left me,
waiting for the dog, that I would have loved,
like a boy loves a dog,
I would have, no doubt,

ah, we see the crowd of mortal witnesses,

did we listen this long, and leave, walk away,
thinking
what will happen with those twelve baskets,
left overs, what
happens with those?

Hear this, old me, now me, listen,
in the air,
the story telling itself to our grands, our next,

next to wonder,
next to never know, as mortals never do, but
we tell of whens when reason was
a think we did,
together,
we reasoned, as you play, we
reasoned, bet this was worth that
if you could see it my way,
and I saw I was seeing
from where I was
con form in form
ing
thing
ing think ink ink in mind
and time
a word, approved,attested to, you

think we should keep kicking?
this from just past the lizard level, flee, or
wait
Pituitary instant, pow, that fast,
stop,
at this point, stops
abrupt
calm, no clench, wondering what cost,
do you have
to pay.
Horrible cost, un mentioned, gore, or
was it only

I don't know, shunning, or out casting, ghosting;

that. that  idea, we never had that, but in hell,
so this is that hell,
ha, work it out.
\
Besides, what if wonder if are not the same act,
in a play for the laurels?