Poetry

Attempts at a lost art (no AI used)

Bad at Poetry

I used to think

I was bad

At poetry

But then I realized

I just hate poets

Lost in arcana

I don’t care about

obscure references to the Iliad or Dante

descriptions of flowers

obsession with meter

Or rhyme

Proving your brilliance

I care about

Wrestling with the Divine

And finding meaning in the dirt

Those who don’t see this

Have a different mission

To fulfill

And that is okay

But Heaven save me

From the poets

—

Staring Into the Sun

Good writing

Comes from pain

The pain of living

And not knowing

If anything matters

Create your own meaning

They say

Glibly

Mindlessly

As they consume

And regurgitate

Propaganda

But

Life is pain

We will die

And soon

Probably painfully

Which is hard to look at

For too long

Like staring into the sun

And the world

Will move on and forget

As it continues its spiral

Into the abyss

—

The Hamster Treadmill

Go to work

Shuffle papers for eight hours

Which could be done

In two

Or less

Keep the masses

On the hamster treadmill

Because otherwise

Chaos

They promised us

Freedom from work

A glorious

Technological future

Meet the Jetsons

Star Trek

The odious stooge Peter Thiel

Famously said

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters?

As he sprints to build

The digital panopticon

Control comes first

Second

Third

Any other priority

Is distant

Control

Is what matters

—

Death is Winning

The Gods are fighting

In us

At all times

The voices we hear

Are echoes of eternity

But we ignore it

Schizophrenia

Autism

Drug me up, doc

As above, so below

You can turn away

But the price to pay

Is huge

The answer lies

In synthesis

But we don’t use this language

The framing is nonexistent

There will be a rebirth of the Old Gods

From inside

Or

Death

And it looks like

Death is winning

—

Drink Escapism

Reading Bukowski

The drinking

Was made romantic

The pain of living

Is almost unbearable

For those sensitive

To the injustice of this world

But drinking

Just masks the problem

Punts it into the future

To enjoy the moment

And maybe that’s the answer

Maybe

There is no answer to be found

But I feel compelled

To try

Anyway

Like Sisyphus

Carrying alcohol up the hill

—

Give Me Attention

Give me attention

Likes

Restacks

Comments

Fill my empty void

With the meaning

Of attention

When nothing is left

Society is a smoking ruin

At least

I will have

Attention

It means

I matter

Somewhere

To somebody

Momentarily

Where is the line

Between writing for oneself

And writing as court jester

In monkey frame

It blurs

It shifts

Inner knowledge of this blur

Doesn’t change the blur itself

It just makes things blurrier

But fuck it

Give me attention

—

My Glorious Talent

Sometimes my ego

Rears its head

Out of the blue

I imagine

I’m the best thing ever

A God-like intellection among idiots

If only people would give me

The attention

I deserve

They lack the discernment

To see

The fools

And then I snap out of it

Nothing is more common

Than unsuccessful men

With talent

Said Calvin Coolidge

Allegedly

Likely it was someone else

But who is to judge

What talent even is?

My bank account doesn’t reflect it

My life doesn’t reflect it

Women have never swarmed me

On what basis

Other than my delusions

Should I listen to this ego?

But discarding it isn’t healthy

Either

It is the alchemical union

Of ego, intuition, senses, and emotion

That points the way

To wholeness

—

The Butterfly Effect

Knowledge of the world

Doesn’t change

That one must still live in it

one can wax poetic all day

The Rothschilds

The central bankers

The meta conspiracies

But at the end of the day

I still have bills to pay

I have to go to work

I still have to interact with zombies

What good

Is knowledge

Without action?

Mental masturbation

But

A calling

Is a calling

Is a calling

A butterfly beats its wings

Who knows

What effect it will have

A world away?

—

On Women

I believed in romance

Once

Putting pussy on the pedestal

Desires molded

By television and film

And porn

Expectations by Mother

Projected onto the object of affection

For worship

And attention

But then

You wake up one day

Next to a Nag

With her own issues

Her own insecurities

Her own will to power

And you realize

She’s just a person

Too

And who likes people?

—

The Screen Beckons

The screen

Blue

Looks into you

As you look into it

Feeding you your desires

A Devil

Holding up a mirror

To Narcissus

Lost in a cloud

Of dopamine

The sands in the hourglass

Fall

Relentlessly

Staring at the blue screen

Toward Death

Could this time be better spent

With family and friends?

But they’re staring at their screens

Too

All around the dinner table

A Norman Rockwell painting

Of screens

Its call is seductive

Alluring

Irresistible

Give me my screen

—

Screaming Food

My food stares at me

Screaming

As I eat it

$7.99 a pound from Whole Foods

Or Trader Joes

Cheap

Cheap

Cheap

Historically peasants ate meat

Once a week

Or month

Now it’s all the time

McDonalds

Tripled their prices

Still cheap

Who wants to pay

$14.99 for free range

Organic

How does one know

What that even means?

These labels

Are slapped on by predators

Thinking us morons

Or not

How does one know?

How does one quantify

Quality of life

Know your butcher

Know where your food comes from

They say

Okay

Great

My food comes

From Outside

Of the Concrete Jungle

And I have no connection

To the earth

A mass industrialized slaughterhouse

Disembodied from Soul

You must be the change you wish to see in this world

Says Gandhi

But where is God in this?

What did the cows do to deserve this?

And why

Oh why

Does my body feel better on a mostly meat diet?

—

Embodying the Process

Delay

Doing what you have to do

Going to work

One becomes an automaton

Guided by Process

Turn the brain off

Let the Process consume you

We worship

What we pay attention to

Through our acts

It has to be done

The worship of Process

If you rebel

You can’t Consume

Can’t Mate

Can’t Live

Ellul stated

Nature would become subordinate

To Process

Now

There is nothing left

but Process

And no one remembers

What it was like

Before

So go through the motions

Subsume yourself to Process

And watch yourself

Perform too

From the vantage of the Other

Because there is

No way out

—

The Uncertainty Principle

Naming the Devil

Drains it of its power

A mysterious process

Of integration

Giving you freedom of choice

Otherwise our unconscious bleeds out

Unacknowledged

Pay fealty to its inner mystery

Or suffer

psychoanalysis is control

They say

Molds people into widgets

Kaczynski wasn’t wrong

But he wasn’t right

either

In a world where

The Gods are dead

Not just in spirit

But in tradition

Nothing to grasp

It is only the Self

Morphing and shifting when observed

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle

Applied to the Soul

Which offers hope

Because if one can’t reach the center

Of one’s own soul

Then how can artificial intelligence

How can elites

How can anyone but God?

The elusiveness of the Self

Is the key

The one thing

Outside of their grasp

—

Terror Management Theory

Internet screeds

Believe me

This way

No, that way

No true Scotsman

And things will get better

Look at the latest outrage!

Designed

to elicit a response

Fed algorithmically

Straight into your brain

You dance

Passionately

With the strings overhead

It feels good

Distracts

From the Void

Bread and circus

Anything to avoid

Contemplation

Of the Void

Chase wealth

Status

Drugs

Alcohol

Travel

Women

Porn

Anything to avoid

Contemplation

Of the Void

But one has to live!

You may say

Meditate as a Buddhist

As a hermit

Until death?

What fun is that?

It isn’t

I don’t do it either

So live the game

Embrace it

Feel alive

Under the strings

Anything

To avoid contemplation

Of the Void

—

Sex and Steak

The five minutes

After a good fuck

Or a good steak

Are the only times

I feel free

Free from want

Free from worry

I cum

And the biochemical and psychological change

Is instant

But fleeting

One may catch a glimpse of Paradise

Through drugs

Or sports

Or success

But it never lasts

One is either chasing an Object

Or bored

The setup of this reality is

All wrong

Satisfaction

Living in the moment

An impossible ideal

We are either thinking of the Past

Or the Future

As we march toward

The certainty

Of Death and Taxes

But knowledge of the process

Changes nothing

So give me

Sex and steak

—

On Natalism

The anti-natalist say

This world is a demiurgic Hell

To bring children into this world

Is selfish

Short-sighted

Capricious

And they’re right

This world is Hell

But having children is a blessing

anyway

The way they see the world

is magical

To give without expectation of return

Is beautiful

But what about their inevitable pain

Disillusionment

Suffering

Death

Aren’t you proscribing that to them

As a curse?

Whether or not

life has a deeper spiritual purpose

We are all here with a unique path

We cannot be whatever we want to be

We can either embrace

our purpose

Or ignore it

And suffer the consequences

That’s the choice

To the extent free will exists

Whether it fulfills God

Or whether it merely fulfills

Ourselves

That task must be viewed as meaningful

Or life

Is not worth living

And if

it is meaningful

Redemptive

Then it is meaningful

Redemptive

for children too

Even if such meaning is

Metaphysically uncertain

—

Truth is Pain

People say truth is freeing

These people

Are full of shit

Truth is a burden

A crushing weight

A haunting demon

That can only be exorcised

Through individuation

Through work

Through output

Writing

Is a suicide postponed

Wrote Cioran

Don’t write

Unless you absolutely must

Wrote Bukowski

Truth

Is what is left

After pain

Has stripped everything else

—

Hogging Out

You read a news article

Written by a chatbot

Narrative established in the bowels of Hell

In London, D.C.

Or Jerusalem

The images used

Either AI-generated

Or may as well have been

Quotes pulled from nonexistent sources

Or scammers in on the game

Like the son of a FBI agent

David Hogg

Popping up as witness in the latest news cycle

Then whisked off to Harvard

Despite a plant IQ

With a rapid political ascent

Hoisted by his woke petard

And we are asked

to take these articles at face value

Everyone else takes it at face value

Around the water cooler

Are they the crazy ones

Or am I?

William J. Casey, CIA director said

We’ll know our disinformation program

Is complete

When everything the American public believes

Is false

But we are social creatures

so

If false is socially true

Then true is false

Clownworld honking

Waiting for the next press release

Posing as news

For our consumption

Pigs at the trough

—

Cognitive Infiltration

You spend hours

Chatting online

With the open-minded

Only to find

They are bots

Run out of Langley

Or men pretending to be women

Out of Langley

Time better spent

Staring at a wall

Or screaming

Into the Void

A deliberate strategy

To disperse energy

Into nothingness

Or conspiracy rabbit holes

As cognitive infiltration

To cripple the epistemology of believers

Thanks, Cass Sunstein

A swirling opaqueness

Descending upon the internet

Destroying free speech

Without banning it

Kafka-esque

Philip K. Dick-esque

dick-esque

How can the masses unite and gather in such an environment?

They can’t

They won’t

So get ready

For the digital panopticon

—

The Power of Now

To spend decades

A lifetime

Reading

Thinking

Writing

Individuating

The alchemical process

To try to approach wholeness

Circumambulation around the center

And at the end

You die

Your memory

Forgotten

Except perhaps

In the Akashic field

From dust to dust

Sooner or later

Famous or unknown

Its only a matter of time

And degree

Everything turns to dust

Even Homer will be forgotten

One day

Ozymandias

The point

The benefit

Must be felt in the here and now

Not in the hope of future gain

It must be worth it

In itself

On some level

Now

Or it isn’t worth doing