Semantic Foundry

“Those Whispers just as you have fallen or falling asleep – what are they and whence?” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Okay, check it. Bad Meets Evil, Welcome 2 Hell. Yeah – required shit.

“Oh, I quite realize no one will read this, at least not in it’s entirety. I have resigned myself to this reality, and perhaps the motivation for posting so very little to gather in recent months. But once in a while it’s worth testing to the waters. Most expect of me writings of User Experience Design or Agile or some such bullshit. I watched “Gothic” this weekend about the ludlum and absynth inspired hallucinatory orgies engaged in by Lord Byron and the Shelleys – the motivation for M. Shelley writing Frankenstein and the phanstasmagoric horrors of a new zeitgeist powered by electricity and magick and I wonder how our new simulations brought about by a new gestalt will empregnate our worldview with such same horrors in this post-social-sharing-some-bullshit-photo world. We cannot yet know – but where are our Byrons? Where are our modern Shelleys? Should we just resign ourselves to the drivel of modern Emo Punk, Weiner Spectacle and illiterate post-new age ditritus that seems to accrete across the media landscape of 1000 poetry groups, and not a poet to be found? This media landscape punctuated by sound bites and flag-draped coffins? I really should drink more coffee” -will

Those Whispers I

Fate was a kinder, gentler bitch, then

repudiating old sorrows. laughter, rebuke. a cath-

arsis of interstices, fumblings, pitfall of

holding onto symbols-without-signs as though

you were an ear. tensing the un-

certain august daylight: a cement structure coursed by

time-lapse shadows where the mob reads

the image of its situation. what difference

is one more walker in the city?

—————————–Intermission————————–

“Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it”.
– Virginia Wolf

Like all dynamic simulations, Virginia Woolf tells us here, memorabilia comes in four categories: 1) Those that stir nothing in the mind of the perceiver, 2) those stirring one-dimensional images that soon become boring, 3) those that generate unbearable meaningless noise and make the receiving mind unstable, 4) those, severely limited in number, that bring forth a chain reaction of fruitful thoughts that stream into the depths of memory until, if ever, its powers have dissipated by becoming an inalienable part of you.

—————————–End Intermission————————–

Those Whispers II

All the world’s a peep-show: store-front reflections—the

rush of pedestrian silhouettes, asphalt curbs, inter-

sections—dry goods hung

from awnings limned against the fractal

sky: these and other signs to be “in accord with the

time” accepting obstruction. 6am

faces out of the Penn Station window. something they are late for and

already rain, already abiding…

in the dark place where you take off the

covering. and the ingenuity of what it does not hide.

“1. That the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single energy.
2. That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
3. That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.”

Well, so much for an exciting and fresh look at things. Work is work, a torrent of mind-numbing shit which suffices for life when one is what?

. . .

For that is one, and a paltry one at that, gift of love, to make even the greatest waste of time’s seam unbearable lightness, managable. But love and death should not be my topic this morning. Today, I believe that we are each at war with our fellows, each desperate to decant our shadows in the sun, each Richard IIIs: incapable of realizing our own beauty (whatever there may be of it) we set ourselves amongst the sheep and gorge ourselves, we ravish the herd, and for each bite through pristine white fleece, we hate ourselves. Today on the CNN, “Narcissism and nehilism.”

“…this vague & dream like world, without love, or heart, or passion, or sex, is the world I really care about, & I find interesting. For, though they are dreams to you, & and I can’t express them at all adequately, these things are perfectly real to me.”
- Virginia Woolf

Oh but there is relish in it. The scent of a musky lover, a woman lying in bed, the taste of the kill, ones own lips on a sweet other pair, their is relish there; but love is now a thing for paupers, the rich or even adequetly well off know only lust, and the bite that sates the hunger is the same that will leave you hungry again, only this time more . . . ravenous.

The near sexual peak and frenzy that accompanies the triumph of one man over another, a sweat and blood-stained boxer standing over the defeated contender, spoojing wildly at the roar of crowd and the sweet iron taste of another’s blood. It is like proving that you were meant for here, for this place, you birth was under a star. You were chosen. Chosen people can’t just wander in the desert, they must eat fresh meat and fuck, no? Taste the salt of blood and sex. Part the blood red sea and eat manna and kvetch.

But, then, what accounts for this? I write. If blood and sex and tears, and effort, then why so easy to write these words, mere sounds? No. More. My poet, artist, savant’s wife, sitting in the sun, and she would write (if she were a man, and that man was me):

“He’s leaving, I tremble;
I feel the precariousness of us
and I sense the looming silence.
Without audience
without a single pair of eyes trained on
my careful performance.

Words keep flowing from my mouth
can’t play dumb at all,
I write in this leather book,
knowing that it doesn’t matter anyway
that even when I lay everything bare
open these guts up to read the signs
there will be no interpreter.

Days turning to months, to years,
stretch from my feet
through rain, beating sun,
and I can’t help the bit of moisture
in my eyes
and I hope he’ll understand.”
- @semanticwill
We were chosen, chosen to fall into hoofed clammy dreams where there is no slumber nor rest, anxious nights of the pack nipping at your heals and by god they are there, and with one faltering step they’ll be on you, so Run Forrest, Run! Its getting dark out and you better run fast or you’ll be caught out here in the cold and dark desert night, and then you’ll never feel so lonely again.

The sun! Sunrise on a new day brings only relish, no nourishment. Light splayed across a beautiful face nothing but the distant memory of a love once inscribed in our being as the sun rose over Chelsea. So run. and don’t you ever believe that sweaty, heavy man out of the cadillac telling you you’ll be the next govenor, never believe that god, a little indian man appearing in your apartment with a pack of fanatics at his heels and you just fucking knew he was selling cigarettes in the West Village the afternoon before. Never believe that trusting smile or those cat like eyes. Fertive, lusting, needy little man.

And to hell with all that.

For my part I look into those eyes and say “yes,” and even when the bullet comes I say yes. And when I am insane and violent, I say yes. And what then, when that man comes out of his Mercedes S-class to tell me something, Fox News Punk, this may be an ode to your creator, and I will say yes. The clusterfuck of life may, without undue hesitation, be simplified by the most simple of words, down to a very crystalline fragment of my memory.

Petty curses come too easily from these lips, and too oft am I likely to complain and grumble. Too many hopes have been dashed on love’s shore, and too many thoughts wasted on my own desperate hopes.

Now is the time I either make my destiny with choice, or allow myself to float towards doom.
I promised to bind myself to something that I could not, in fact, catch; now I find I have only netted myself, and desperately I hope to cast of such shackles I hopes would ensnare another. Vain hopes, that have brought not but heartache, disappointment. I could sing such songs of love, but I choose rather not to, and to rather seek in my self the will to sing new songs, to capture my own intemperance and direct it where I may.

I have hurt many on this strange direction of mine, will hurt many more, and I am not ashamed. Such can be, and oft is, the price of freedom.

“For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles . . . and so goodbye . . .”

We are all born into these marvelous bodies of ours, fantastic in their dimensions, their beauty, their sheer potential. And as children we slowly become aware of these daunting characteristics of our forms. We can love, hate, weep, dance, and shout with ecstacy. But somewhere along the line a piece, or two, slides off into murky depths, never to be seen again unless an echo should pierce our senses, an arrow of memory.

Once the first piece falls, their is no stopping the avalanche, and slowly those gorgeous manifestations of ourselves are depleted, the numerous layers of electric flesh fall away.

“He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.” – Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

It is a stripping down process, perhaps due to our first realization of the beauty and measure of existence; once it is known it must die. So things fall away, and we are stripped down to the last breathing piece, a sad fetus of little worth, and those around us mock the fetus, or mourn for its brokenness, or simply state that he/she/it/we can’t handle the strain of living.

Its true.

We can’t.

Because living is dying, it is watching that which we hold so valuable slip away, never to be had again. It is seeing so many loves destroyed, stolen away, or diseased and foetid, rotting away.

I only hope that when I am left naked, stark raving mad, a rapidly fading shell of what could have been, there will be enough breath and coherent thought to curse this life, this god, this place, for taking away everything that mattered. When I am naked and purged of all earthly things, standing before judgement, I pray to be able to say “fuck you” and disappear, yet another echo, another arrow of memory, to trouble and mock what is left of those who knew me.

“To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.”

Such are my thoughts on this fine morning. Take them for what they are.