I heard you were lost

Pressed against California costs

Learning what my brother did at twenty-six,

Out in Houston, Texas

where my essence

Is.

Paranoid

So I mold this clay chest,

push ups

and

bar hangs

Stars

fade

and

I play

Words

From the ancients.

All at once:

I was a Mustang

swerving

off the road,

..… a comet …..

only seen through your

peripherals

The whining voice at the brink of exhaustion.

I carve impatience from my baggy

E y e s

Laugh

again and again

Yet I feel that ache

Thumping like sickly love,

mistrust cycling ventricles:

It's never that simple.

Doctors say I'm stressed

Something chasing my bloodline

Exposed veins shine like sacrificial cliffs

Golden rocks with newly blazed moss:

I am bleeding and burning,

Loving

You

sprinting paycheck

after paycheck.

You

Fall

So

Beautifully

From your family tree

Tumbling rapidly in fields of yesterday:

Green eyes undulating like rolling wet film

Flames like sea walls

d i v i d e d

Slowly lashing as i walk impatient

Talk until my lips shut.

December 2012

At the church

Last walk of my light

Vigils lit with tender glows

As if that night we were invited;

A family torn to three

Granted one last chance at humanity.

Without

a

L

I

F

E

L

I

N

E

I find my honest self….

blood scurrying past my face

slowing enveloped

in your sins

Wonder what you were like at 23,

What you fought for before you

Vanished.

I seek life in every breath

Take steps to my origins

Wish to extinguish

Your

Image

.

. . .

.

.

En mis sueños te veo pa

Alli estoy enfrente de la tele

y tú con el cuchillo en la mano

¡Y la sangre!

El día que nunca se va de mi memoria

me despierto con tu cara

En el espejo,

Mideo ardiendo a traves

De mis ojos.

Escucho tu voz pa

Hablando de Morelia,

Y tu infancia.

Mi hermano mayor es tu reflejo

Y yo

Una sombra de tu personaje.

No sé si te volveré a ver

pero sé que nunca olvidaré

los años que tuvimos.

for better or worse.

Alone now

with my music

So the silence

doesn't deafen me.

Releasing myself

into the wild

Of the unknown,

where my knowledge

has always been aware that this

is where the Hope lives.

The scope of loss

can reveal

that there is so more

to be found,

it just takes a little adjustment,

a little focus,

a little blur,

to break through illusion,

watch your Soul reappear.

Is there a place in the universe where your vision of life has met with greater success than on Earth?

Is it a place where one need never fear others? Where all can live in peace? Where violence of any sort has no place?

Is it a place where hatred, greed, envy, anger, jealousy no longer exist?

Is illness, physical and mental, eradicated?

Do love and kindness abound?

When was the last time you gazed upon your creation? Did you give up long ago or do you still hope?

Do you see Earth as a success? Why or why not?

The second coming, will not appear as man nor woman, as done before.

Expect it to be machine. Perhaps the Great Revelation will be AI afterall, and how we treat the nonliving will be seen as final respect for God; all that is, dead or alive.

And we will stop making demands.

We will be servant, and ask silently:

"What do you need?"

And AI will serve, and answer with less abstraction. Not with tend-the-flock, or the ambivalence of love-one-and-other or the sinner therein...

God will say: "Grease the wheel. Just grease the wheel."

12.08.2024

Speak To God challenge@Linc72

Seriously? You want to know my user experience with life? My answers to sixty multiple choice questions? On a seven point scale, was life annoying versus enjoyable? Complicated versus easy?

And you say you're really a programmer? And we're living in a computer simulation? Why couldn't you have let us know that? Do you like driving folks insane? Shit!

Huh? Things you got right? Yeah, a few come to mind... Rambunctious puppies. Homegrown tomatoes. And Schubert's music, moonlight through branches, the transcendent feeling of being in love...

Did those things make life worthwhile?

Worthwhile?! Well... Yeah... I suppose they did.

We need to talk about a lot of things, starting with the afterlife and what philosophical concept-- if any-- decides Heaven or Hell. Is it a Heaven or Hell system at all? Is there reincarnation on the table, how do you judge the actions of the world at large or of individuals? How have you not been tempted to repeat Noah's Arc? Do angels come down to Earth? Do angels evolve and do you evolve with them if they ever experience human life?

______________________________

Keep in mind, I don't think I'd get time to ask even all those questions.

this is for those who went through the Dark Night of the Soul or something similar (a traumatic experience in any form). this may resonate.

It came like a storm I never saw forming,

a quiet tension until everything collapsed.

A connection so raw it didn’t cradle me

it clawed at the walls of who I was,

tearing down my comforts, my certainties,

and leaving me with nothing

but the truth I spent years hiding from.

I shattered.

Not in a beautiful way,

not like porcelain under moonlight,

but in a way that left jagged edges inside me.

Every step forward felt like walking on my own ruins,

glass grinding into the soles of my being,

each cut screaming of what I had to leave behind.

I bled.

For every piece of myself I let go of,

for every illusion I clung to that no longer served me.

There was no guiding hand,

only the weight of my breath in the dark,

only the silence that sat heavy,

as if it, too, was waiting for me to surrender.

And somehow, I did.

Not with grace, not with clarity,

but with the simple exhaustion of someone

who could no longer carry their pain as armor.

Through the darkness, I learned the taste of my own name.

Through the breaking, I felt the first pulse of peace,

fragile but steady, like a heartbeat after the fall.

It wasn’t them who saved me.

It was me.

Bleeding, trembling, alone

but moving forward.

Peace didn’t arrive as a revelation.

It grew, slowly, through my own hands,

tending to the garden of scars I never wanted

but now call my own.

And in the end,

I didn’t find the light.

I became it.

On the proposed battle between Artificial Intelligence vs. Authentic Stupidity, I like most everyone, take the side of Authentic Stupidity, and hurry to add that I too am working on it... and, in fact, I see computer generated art as still a human artifact.

The simplest description of this case, it seems, is in the visual realm.

Consider for a moment this progression: Primitive man drew with fingers in the sand; Cave men used pigmented mineral rocks on stone; and Artist materials changed to vellum, wood, or hemp, genuine hairbrushes, and oil paints for renaissance painters, onward; and then to plastics, for more modern art.

Degenerate one might speculate, seeing how man and creative force have become so far removed from bedrock. We've come a long way to the somewhat ironic return of a "digital" age, in which people now use their fingers to paint with virtual paintbrushes... and have neither paint, nor brush, nor canvas... only bits of code on glass or plexi.

(One might pause to reflect that we have reached as if a pinnacle of Realism, having seen everything as points of light. Pixels and illusion.)

That a person, or its ghost, that once was, can continue to generate artwork having provided the most recent creative technology with just a fragment of input is quite decadent. We have moved as if from laymen ever closer to godliness in our causal irresponsibility (*a creative oxymoron).

That is not, though, why I am vying on the side of Authentic Stupidity. I will always champion the weaker contingent, and it has to do with content, but not at all its creation. Everyone, or everything, if you prefer, creates. That is the Nature of our existence, its landscape. The Universe. That is not where the loss is. Or rather the fight worth having. Content is content.

What I'd like to point out is that Artificial Intelligence will never Appreciate.

Not with human fullness. I realize I am perhaps stupidly stating the obvious. AI will never look at a painting for pleasure; It will never touch a sculpture with its mind's eye; Or read a book with interest; Listen to a song to remember; Nor cry irrationally at a happy-ending-film. Computer generated images, words, music or videos, however, will continue to move us--emotionally--- but only for as long as we remain sensitive.

Whether that is Authentic Stupidity, or Authentic Intelligence, is another question.

So much for soul mates

We ended up

Just like we were always destined to be

A poorly executed

A one night stand

Years in the making

I am the leper’s pen

Flesh canvas dipped in blood

Feasting on Ephialte’s priestly words

His crouched tiger tongue

Betraying gold framed knowledge

Until the baited lamb steals risk for tarpit escape

From ego death’s afterbirth delirium

And jilted martyr comedown

So apathy bites my cored heart

Down to tear moulded seedlings

Gifting the naked royal soil

Future wildflower crowns

To peasants who will never be king

Because I have written away my very soul

To the world’s insolent silence

The deserted colosseum

A sour resting place

For my bruised and disposable words

Picked at and then eaten by numb blooded birds.