michael-dean-k/

In dark slantrays creaked; Column of light kitchen; Glimmeredged hum tank; With blurlight tinnit(us)—reflecting—hunched; Computer-creature.site; death-defied; Wonder the walkable… Mysteries! All snoring; Thumb-crunching only-words: compounding; Tightness, overtime, up early, waking babes of any; The moment’s itch flexing a cracktoe, the; Hundred familiar ticks of bØdy.

(A writing exercise after reading Emerson's essay on how once you can see nature, you've unlocked a constellation of metaphors that can be used to describe anything. Take 1:)

Our clipped potential, like a tree’s arms trimmed for obstructing power lines, left a mighty trunk that bears no fruits, offers no shade;

Our unborn ideas, cities and cities full, like scattered brown pollen accreted on riverbanks of sidewalk;

Our restless mind, pattered with the sizzling doinks of a pickleball frenzy;

Our dreams faded, like disappearing engine hums of transatlantic birds;

Our interiors unguarded, like the iron fence with a body-shaped hole, bent;

Step not into the confusion of a gnat swarm;

See history clearly, without the illusion of time, and as you enter the park, see at once all past visitors at their moment of entering; see some trodden zones as a cacaphony of bodies, a mob of holographic sound, light, and limbs; see the edge where you make out human forms making out; see over time the cloud getting thinner and thiner until you see those picnicking, those illegally camping, that one who died in the park.

i’ve counted from beginning ’til end; juggled in the school circus; memorized the stats of a baseball league's baseball players; fallen hundreds of Christmas trees with a handsaw; dined in the Twin Towers the week before; shattered my arm snowboarding; constructed angles of imaginary rooms in floor plans; plotted the angle of sun at specific times and days; trip-sat for a philosopher-librarian with cancer; built a computer from scratch; made someone cry from a VR moon simulation; carved time with sticks and given a perfect score by NYS; diagrammed the secret forms of a nation’s songs; performed at venues that are now Italian restaurants; astral travelled out of my body; lucid dreamt; dined with a billionaire, once; wept at a total eclipse; made an infant laugh.

Beads of sun; Gradientless, cloudless, planeless sky; The physical slither of uncountable leaves colliding, nature’s white noise atop a distant boulevard rumble; Right now it's "peak human temperature," (a term shared by wife and I); Plus, dramatic shadows on tutors and illuminated bushes, perfectly trimmed Japanese hedge-gardened lawn and canopies glitter the grass 'round broken shards of angular sidewalk; Pushing the baby cart, with jabbing bumps not strong enough to wake the deep snooze, in a bassinet she'll soon outgrow; I have no agenda; I have no financial worry, creative worry, familial worry, no-one-liked-my-rushed-newsletter worry; It all collapses into the eye of a sparrow, into that one-hundred year tree fallen by lightning and blocking the path at C Park; I assume we'll get tacos soon; Whatever this is, now, feels like the supreme virtue: an earned negligence to the totality of material demands; A temporary and wonderlaced stupidity.

San Francisco, where billboards of slop promote slop promotions,

impossible benefits from machine intelligences;

San Francisco, where the Dead reborn in golden Park,

to dance with perpetual stank

face to nitrous balloons and tie dye,

until Mickey Hart plays cosmic harp,

with shamanic visuals to drunk men,

pointing and chanting his name;

San Francisco, where half the cars are driven by ghosts,

and sometimes catch fire at night;

San Francisco, where the powerful have,

their souls caught in their throats,

from crackled-out platitudes and slogans.

San Francisco, where that Transamerican pencil pyramid is,

a backdrop for cinema-quality technology trailers,

signaling their city is the city of new religion.

There's a foolishness in embracing slop-poetry over real poetry. Yeah, you can ask 100 casual Americans who haven’t put any time into reading or understanding poetry, and they’ll all prefer LLM outputs because they have a tendency for explicit clarity, but maybe it’s worth having some opaque mediums. When it comes to essays, I think accessibility is important. But poetry is supposed to be cryptic and mysterious. It’s a feature that it haunts you and reveals itself to you over decades. For every thousand who balk at it, it finds one person to completely infiltrate. I’d be curious to see this same study among poetry readers.

The inauguration is ominous, Among American flutes and tubas, Overdubbed with sportscasters, A Sgt. Pepper’s collage of faces, Clinton, Cook, Bezos, Musk, All the world’s wealth, All the power, An ark of 500, And towering tyrant Baron, Surrounded by portraits, Grown, scared children, Like us,

But of leaders leading the chasm’s cross, Who here are the truly kind? And which have killed? You wouldn’t know, If you witnessed Rome, In high-resolution, In reflective eyes of Elon, Ghosts of founding fathers hover the rotunda, Looking down, like us, the tele-spectators, On soap operas of our civic machine, $MELANIA is here, $1.5 billion, Her memoir ghostwritten, And Christopher croons, As the sitting Skeleton marches through, The cryptic colonnade that holds DC,

Afront the hillbilly with sharp tongue, Cameras zoom: wigged men with pens, Documents that failed us, Stretched to shreds with mutations of, Alien culture and titanic force, But all the old books, The furling rules and conventions, Won’t help where we’re going, There are no acolytes on this American path,

“The President elect Donald J. Trump,” He missed the kiss on his wife’s cheek by an inch, The pleasantries can’t hide the tension, I imagine Jill Biden pulling a pistol, I imagine these petty, ancient quarrels will soon be pale, For the valley is pregnant not with fruits, But secret, ripening, superintelligence, The speaker now quotes Bob Dylan, She speaks at 1,000 bits per second, Like an ant, Except ants can’t lie,

The people run our country? It’s the troops who bomb and rig elections? Since when has democracy transcended its dress? And now we pray, And draw comparisons to biblical heroes, As they swear in JD Vance With smiling wife, And daughter sucking thumb, I imagine a horrible assassination, Of trump’s head exploding, From some CIA sniper, On an off-camera balcony,

Cannons fire when it becomes official, Marchers chant hallelujahs, The dawn of the Golden Age of America, Sunlight is pouring over the entire world, Momentum will annihilate the shadows, God bends bullets to save the patriot, Self-declared: “Liberation day,” “The most consequential day in American history,” “A revolution of common sense,” “The spirit of the next great frontier is written in our souls.”

From all cosmologies, know thy quest; From stagnant phenomes, slant through fresh; Of mechanical order, keep it light; Of creative angles, enter right; On abstract virtues, live this hour; Upon third doors, do not cower; In voids of nothing, wait and perch; In cities of noise, build a church.