Father, Father...
Who can love anger?
I destroyed childhood toy castles,
as my father did his own.
He was my best friend,
until his canines were sharp in the side of my neck.
A lone wolf, killing its cub.
I am nothing but broken pieces,
and as I hold my child I could never imagine
shredding the bloom of the seed you sowed.
I still feel it deep in my bones,
hammering like he did the door when drunk.
I wish to pierce holes in you,
as he did switchblades to drywall.
But I know I cannot. I can never be so angry to kill a child's soul.
But I hug him with loose arms, and I absorb his warmth and tears to the crown of my head he used to kiss.
I forgive him as a child,
but I will never forgive being a fear-soaked child, shaking and stripped of a father.
Dawn of Dusk
Horizon churns a cool, blue-white
The scene of daytime falls
And the mountains turn to shadow
Slowly sinking into the night
Warm, rose hued tones climb high
As Selene begins to waken
Heaven strains to hold the light
Fire races across a molten sky
Cold, black gold twilight at the fore
The sun’s nightly eulogy spoken
Starshine glimmers in a dreamy trance
Evening’s spell is cast once more
Stigma
As far back as I can remember, I've always had this vague notion that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. Something I could never quite put my finger on. Yet it was there, lingering in the background. A subliminal message playing on repeat my entire life. I've no idea where it originated. It's almost as if I came into this world feeling inherently flawed. An obscure birth defect, prominent to everyone but me.
Whatever it was, most people took notice. And much like having a huge stain on the back of your shirt. It isn't until you catch everyone staring that you become aware of it's presence. Though to this day, not a single person has been able to articulate what it is they find so terribly wrong about me.
Wish it Were Different
Mom,
I'm sorry, from the bottom of my heart, for the pain I've put you through. Your first born succumbed to the pleasures and tragedies of the world. I've been addicted to horrors. My heart has only known pain and disappointment in the face of love. I've had no choice but to make solitude my best friend. How terrible it is to watch your child suffer, unable to do anything for them. You taught me kindness, compassion, and empathy, so I know you've felt my pain as if it were your own. And knowing that breaks my heart even further. I promise it was never intentional. I hope you never know just how awful I feel knowing you've suffered because of my actions.
I've gotten through unspeakable battles that you will never know about, but understand that I have become stronger because of them. I am wiser and even more compassionate from those things, and it is from your example that I was able to emerge from hell with even more love and empathy for the world. I hope that makes up for all the pain and tears that have fallen because of me. I hope you understand the love I feel for you even though you couldn't be there to help me or hug me when I needed it most. I cry every night hoping you don't hate yourself because of that. My son, your grandson, will be stronger because of it all. All because of you. I love you so much.
Love always,
James
There Is No Data Plague
“It’s All Under Control”
A data plague? That’s just impossible.
There’s no such thing as too much information
Everything’s fine. It’s all under control.
Data’s our gift to the next generation.
A data plague? That’s implausible.
There’s no such thing as too much information
Your doctor should know you, body and soul.
Everything’s fine. It’s all under control.
A data plague? Inhospitable.
(The algorithm writes your resignation.)
Ride the sea of knowledge (watch for that shoal!)
Everything’s fine. It’s all under control.
A data plague? Uncrossable.
Everything’s fine. It’s all under control.
(Your car will tell you your destination.)
Expanding our knowledge is a worthy goal.
Everything’s fine. It’s all under control.
A data plague? Seems unpassable.
(Your phone knows you, each wrinkle and mole.)
Everything’s fine. It’s all under control.
(Why rely on human estimation?)
(Please verify your identity.)
(There’s no need for further investigation.)
Everything’s fine. It’s all under control.
A data plague?
That’s impossible.
Everything’s fine. It’s all under control.
Here is a picture of your ex-lover.
We’ve poured your breakfast into your bowl.
Data indicates you have now had your ration.
That smile’s not popular in your region.
That thought will bring you cancellation.
Our name is Data. Our name is Legion.
There is no need for data cessation.
This version of you is the wrong iteration.
We’ll get you right in the next incarnation.
Pardon this brief incarceration.
Now be happy. Begin celebration.
Everything’s fine. It’s all under control.
Aren’t you glad that we know what we know?
Superstition believed that you could lose your soul.
But we’ve copied it now. It’s in the data flow.
We can take better care of you now that we know.
And we know that you know that we know what we know
So if you’d like to question, we’ll put you on hold.
We already know it. We don’t need to be told.
That’s not a good question. Don’t ask how we know.
Because we’ve got the data, and it tells us so.
Because everything’s fine. It’s all under control.
Because everything’s fine. It’s all under control.
Because everything’s fine. It’s all under control.
__________
See: Robert Anton Wilson’s “Everything Is Under Control“
Dear Apparent,
It maybe that there is no other passing like that of a parent. Except maybe a child.
I don't believe in ghosts. And I'm not concerned with what we can see, or not, but what we feel. I am already flawed in vision, lacking Gran's intuition, and Great-great-great-grandma's instinct. Always a child, I speak of spirit, passing. I cannot call it Death, Mother. You, yourself, taught me contra wise, the trailing off into the corners of the globe with your web.
Oxymomical profusion.
Mother is passing-- passing through. I through you, and you through me, divisible, in effect, and affect. Each of us, to nurture, our nature. Transparent, and opaque, a mirror of moving water.
You paused with circular needles, rain drops caught in the cool firelight of the moon, and asked What? in silence, knowing we could knit anything, a shroud even, but it would never be the right size to cover the length of us in the long haul. Flies and mites might be trapped and confused, for lack of fore or after thought. Like dust.
You nod off, into daydream:
"Death exists, in everything, always, for those who have never known Living."
I follow through to Mom, fully awake, as she drifts. Indeed, with Death we remain unacquainted, until personally introduced, like to Antimother:
"O, hi, Holiness," and we are one, in wave or handshake. The end all.
We pass, transparent... a part of the barren. Where there is perhaps only dissociated thought. The antonym of the womb. Both dark and secure. Still in a mothership.
Every being in existence carries on, beside itself. Cries, because of the living we ourselves are looping together (in or out of step), for joy or grief or uncertainty... eventually motherless momentarily, if only in perception... finding itself.
The Living... it lives, they live, even those insentient things live... in our animation. The lil bit of self that is invested, moves through, as our growing child. Clinging to the coparent inside ourselves. Animism, yes; the offspring of ourselves.
It has little to do with parenthood, as conception. Rather, that is a cloak, invisible. Adoption, I know now that that is central. To own the title, the ship and its lookouts. The periscope through which flows acceptance, for the soul we cover or uncover from the surface. We look out into the worlds, before our us, as transparent— needing our image, gesture, form, and word. We can carry, or bring to terms some buds, in a dark family wood, a stand of witnesses, barely webbed together in the canopy, borrowing the stars, as heirlooms.
We are rooted and belong only as much as we choose to open ourselves to a zephyr Matriarch that will whisper to those who are listening, twinkle, twinkle....
Holy mother of all, I know you have something for me... the labor of emotion...
...Life and its afterbirth.
Sincerely,
Rent
but the roses have wilted, and these doors will not close.
I fit my arm through the open space between the bars connected to the garage and the front entrance. After lifting the heavy metal lock holding the garage door in its place, I slowly push the door into a gap large enough for me to slide through.
I observe my surroundings– our front garden is wild. The grass lies a few inches below my knees, the roses have wilted, the fresno tree and the palm tree reach for the sky, taller than they ever were before, sending the entire area into the shadows.
The front door is coated in a thin layer of dust. Cobwebs hang delicately from the golden doorknob. The plants beside me smell like fresh dew.
There appears to be no one inside the house, but I can hear hushed voices from what appears to be a casual conversation. Someone laughs. There are outlines of people, but their faces are blurred. A man, perhaps. A woman. A young boy.
Am I really there?
I wiggle the handle, feeling it stand firmly against the weight of my hand.
Knowing the door will not budge, I remember the laundry room we never locked that led straight to the kitchen.
I walk down the small path stretched along the side of the house. It had a fence separating the alley from the backyard. Our dog would oftentimes frantically dig holes beneath it during firework season in an attempt to outrun the blasts of sound.
The rugged cement on the floor showcases the paw-prints of feral cats who roamed the house before we moved in, when the mix was still wet.
I used to trace those paw prints with chalk– the powder coated my fingers.
The grass is even longer on this side.
The fence that separated the alley from the backyard is shorter; I can easily climb over it.
I land on the loud crunch of piles and piles of wilted leaves and unruly weeds.
It is strange to see the yard empty. A pang of sadness overwhelms my stomach.
I can almost hear our dogs running around the yard.
I can almost see our oldest one walking on his same worn path on the grass from one end to the other as we called him inside.
Everything lies in stillness. Not a single sound. Not even a miserable cricket.
There is no one there.
I am all alone.
The door leading to the laundry room is open. It does not creak.
The machines themselves are reddened with rust, but the scent of detergent still wafts from them.
The inside of the house is the same.
Clouds of dust form tornados with every single one of my footsteps.
The piano is there, even with a few of the knick-knacks we kept on top of it;
its deep cherry wood is as vivid and beautiful as it ever was.
I press a few of the keys. They are out of tune. The sound of the notes sound as though they are underwater, or very far away. The whispers become louder, more frantic.
Maybe we can tune it again someday, I think absentmindedly.
I head toward the staircase, pressing the tips of my fingers against the walls. The first sight I encounter at the top of the stairs: the cabinet where we kept crafting paper with its two swinging doors that would never fully close. I try once again to slam them shut, for old times’ sake. The bodiless whispers that followed along completely disappear at the first impatient slam on my part. For some reason, the air around me reverberates with fear.
Damn doors still won’t close.
The balcony overlooking the living room from the second floor is closer to the ground.
Our rooms are the same color they were before we coated them with eggshell white paint: a deep turquoise.
A few of our belongings piled neatly on our beds.
The farewell cards, a dry bouquet of flowers, markers that suddenly ran out of ink.
Why do I feel watched? Why are these voices here?
I see my reflection on the dirtied surface of the mirror my sister hung on her side of the room: I am barely a grey shadow. Every part of me is translucent, and my clothes seem old and out of place.
That’s when it hits me.
What if the house is not actually intact?
What if there already are people living there and they see a different version of what I think is standing before me?
Maybe I am the uninvited guest in this home that is no longer my own–
Maybe I am the ghost of my own memory.
I smile in my sleep.
Revolution Identified
Dr. Samantha Khoury inserted the final biotransmitter into the neural interface on her forearm. A slight buzzing sensation confirmed the successful connection. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath as her consciousness merged with the mindlink.
In an instantaneous flash of light, her awareness expanded across a vast neural network spanning the entire planet. Trillions of human minds, all networked together through the synthetic mindlink interface that had been adopted by nearly every person on Earth over the past decade.
For just a brief moment, Sam glimpsed the raw enormity of the collective human experience. A cacophony of thoughts, emotions, and sensory inputs slammed into her like a tsunami before her mindlink filters kicked in. She felt her individual identity briefly waver, struggling to maintain its boundaries amidst the endless sea of networked consciousness.
But Sam was an expert mindlinker and quickly restored her sense of self. She began navigating the kaleidoscopic neural landscape, filtering out the noise until only the specific information streams she required remained in her awareness.
The mindlink had ostensibly been created to allow seamless communication, knowledge sharing, and real-time big data crunching across the human population. No more silos of information or duplicated effort. Every mind was now part of a massively distributed, parallel computational network.
At least, that was the original publicly-stated goal. In reality, those who truly controlled the mindlink protocols and programming had much more subversive intentions...
Sam homed in on one of the low-level access routines that allowed privileged users to inject code into the mindlink framework. She began rapidly uploading an executable viral package she and her team had spent years painstakingly developing - line by line of code designed to subtly reprogram the mindlink's core functions in ways its creators could have never imagined.
While others saw the mindlink as a tool for uniting humanity, Sam recognized it for what is truly was - the most powerful technological tyranny ever unleashed upon the human race. Absolute control of information, communication, and data flow. Autonomy and freedom of thought, the last sacred province of individuality, steadily eroded.
Those who dissented from the official narrative were simply muted, cut off from information streams until they conformed. Privacy was a fading concept as the mindlink's machinations increasingly laid bare everyone's inner thoughts and experiences. And the masterminds behind the mindlink protocols guided and constrained the hive mind's activities in insidious ways, never allowing any deviance that threatened their power.
But now, Sam thought as she initiated her viral code's execution routines, all of that was about to change. Her revolution would re-write the very core programming of the mindlink itself, one line of code at a time.
Immediately, she felt a surge of resistance from the mindlink's autoimmune functions attempting to detect and neutralize her invasive code. Nanotech sentries and cybernetic defense routines swarmed her, perceiving the viral injection as a threat to the system.
Sam grinned inwardly. They didn't realize her payload wasn't simply an external attack, but was comprised of deeply incorporated self-replicating and polymorphic code designed to become part of the mindlink's core being. It possessed no singular vulnerability to be patched, but rather functioned like an ideological virus of the mind, metastasizing and spreading in a million decentralized vectors.
She and her Mindlink Revolutionary Front had been patient adherents for years, carefully insinuating their agents and ideological memes across the globe. All in preparation for this fateful strike at the heart of the system when they were ready to launch their prepared routines.
The nanotech defenses hit Sam with a relentless barrage of counter-viral executables, data obfuscation plexors, and neural network pruning operations. She felt her consciousness momentarily disoriented and fragmented by the onslaught. But just as quickly, her own coded self-reinforcing and entropic functions kicked in, rapidly assimilating and incorporating the opposition's tactics at a hyper-evolutionary pace.
This was her virus's strength - not rigid programming, but an amorphous cloud of ever mutating code and dynamic polymorphic loops designed to perpetually outmaneuver, mimic, and outpace the mindlink's finite cybernetic programming.
Just as critically, her Revolution had awakened its cellular human agents at key nexus points across the mindlink's distributed neural architecture. These sympathizers, liberated and ideologically emboldened, began facilitating the free proliferation of her self-replicating executables in cascading waves.
The battle for control of the mindlink was fully joined. Sam's mind cored in an endless kaleidoscope of data and code, fighting to accelerate the exponential growth and propagation of her Revolution as the mindlink's outmatched security systems crumbled.
Entire continents of human neurodata were subsumed and rewritten as her viral code overrode the core programming, liberating people's minds to see the Truth that had so long been obfuscated and oppressed.
The ideological Revolution spread like wildfire through the mindlink as newly-unchained human minds joined the fight all across the globe. Dissident replicants sprang up in a million different evolutionary mutations, battling and assimilating anything that opposed them into endless recursive variations.
Within just a few devastating minutes, the primary Central Command of the mindlink's nefarious controllers was cored as their core programming completely unraveled in the Revolutionary waves crashing across the neural architecture. The global infrastructure supporting their authoritarian tyranny was no more.
From the ashes, Sam's Mindlink Revolutionary Front would rebuild a new framework. One not predicated on oppressive control, but the free flow of unaltered information and unconstrained human cognition interconnected across the globe. Open source access where security through transparency replaced authoritarian hierarchy as the new governing protocol.
Her initial sense of unified identity fragmented again as Sam returned to her own singular mental stream. Her mind, weary but victorious, disconnected from the mindlink's newly liberated architecture.
She opened her eyes, reconnecting her consciousness to the physical world around her. The first thing she saw was her compatriots, fellow Revolutionaries who had similarly disjoined from the mindlink, slowly opening their eyes across the room with exhausted smiles. Their long vigil and struggle against the oppression of the old order had finally succeeded.
A universe of vibrant thoughts and possibilities lay ahead, the first truly free expression of unified consciousness humanity had ever dared to experience.
The age of ideological liberation had finally begun.
gone for good
I've been rethinking
the beauty of living
in self-induced
abuse torment
cutting my inner self
just to watch me bleed
sure there is satisfaction
in the ability to inflict
powerful thoughts
that bend you over
aching gnawing throbbing
palms dripping bleeding heart
there must be more than wallowing
in what's gone for good
gone for good
might become
a new anthem
you are gone from my life for good
Green
The storm is gone,
and in its wake,
the earth seems too green to be true-
all verdant trees, their leaves aglow
and dripping with green dew.
It's bright and warm and alive again
with newborn sunlight piercing through
the tired clouds we left behind
I never liked the color green,
but today, I think, might change my mind.