Detris

Smoldering ruins is all I see all around. The smell is acrid, full of the stench of death. It exhilarates me to no end. By it I know I have life. We have hope for the future.

The year is unknown. The planet seems to be earth, but it's hard to tell from our perspective, being as we're so close to the ground against these old giants which once ruled our land.

Our shells are hard as the chrystaline stones we walk upon, but our insides, liquid to the core, pure in fact, cannot be touched by any outside force, no matter how large and seemingly powerful. We are purity itself, hidden in our shell.

The gods are instrumental and deliriously figurative for us all. This land is ours for now.

Shit. They have a bigger weapon than us again. Back to the research lab! Build them bigger and smaller till we erase them all from the face of this ground. They look nothing like us. Any similarity is purely accidental.

We must do everything in our power to gather the remains of their day so that we can survive beyond these small days.

God is ONLY like us. He has six legs and has omniscient antennae. Thus we mustn't ever be confused about God's nature.

Devouring the remains of the dead is essential to our well being, just so long as it's not among our own.

But the dead among our own count too. The dead always serve the purposes of the living.

After all, we must live.

Feedback Machine

I'm tired of the sugar
I need the salt
Filling my acrid tongue

Filter it down till I can understand

Filter it down till I can understand

Filter it down till I can understand

Blessed are the poor until you get rich
I've seen her type on the side of the road before
Piece of shit begging for her life
She's pregnant with who knows what
Hospital wrist band still on her hand
as I hand her a twenty dollar bill
with assuage in my death like grasp

Hello Jesus on the side of the road.

Wrists

Slipping my wrists
into the slits of your soul
Awakens me to the pain
of borrowed time

Slamming doors awaken me
to all of your days of old
Always trying to forget
the stamps of my own
daguerreotype

Splicing the dice
until we both rolled
our lives away

Splicing the dice
until we both rolled
our lives away

Playing for keeps

Blinded Visionaries

Blinded visionaries
seeking perceptions
Lids hanging low
by sights too hard to see
Freed by the weigh
of a thousand burdens

Poet Tree

You helped me to plant a garden of words
in the soil of my life
Seedlings of laughter and pain
sprinkled across my soiled soul
into the dried cracks soon
to be rained upon by droplets
of love and hate interspersed
with silent embraces with dripping
sarcasm filling the chasm
which sometimes stood silently
between us

Weeds sprout there too
but sometimes even they have flowers

196

The frequency of your posts don't make any sense to me.

Sheesh. It's almost like you make sense to me.

Written wrists slip across your wrists slit

Permitted to lists, sometimes insipid,
slitted inside my wrists.

Invisible wounds, seen by no one
except everyone with
Eyes to see and ears to hear.

Visions invisible to any natural eye to see.

Visible to every eye to see.

Sheesh, your eyes,

It's almost like I can see your eyes.

Frequencies can be a hard thing.

Betwixt and In Between

Bipolar opposites
swirling intertwined
Fueled by swirling emotions
Cued by instincts
intuitively inspired by
you and me.

Figuring the signatures
Signing away the rights
Flights flying away
to highways and byways
slighted and benighted
by signatories
always lying.

The Great In Between stands
in between the chasm of
what we all are told to believe
Dropping down to the valley below.

Visions of Gehenna
and Hosanna
intertwined
Voiced together
Sung in harmony
Various singers
stepping in and out
Deciding when to sing.

Until the song is finally
spent and sung
unintentially expressed
as chaos and a voice
betwixt and in between.

Nervous Nerve Endings

Inexplicable pain
courses through my body
An excited calmness
pervades my skin and everything within
Till all of me
all of me quivers within
With equivications
inexplicable
filled with pain.

Photos in a Suitcase

Your feet are drenched, smelling of the ocean water.
You carried what you could as you ran for your life.
But the smell of sulphur clings to your lips and nose
as you fled the missiles and soldiers seeking after you
selling everything, sometimes even yourself,
just to get away from it all.

The photos are wrinkled and terribly fragile.
Discolored by age and wear and tear.
Over exposed to the elements of the age
we all find ourselves in.

But we hold them close to our chests
fractured though they are from the wars
within and without.

We hold them close to our chests
fractured though they are
from the wars within and without.

Seeking asylum from an insane asylum
only to be looked upon as an invader
scapegoated, segregated, isolated
barely tolerated, constantly berated.

I can feel my humanity slipping away
as layer and layer of who it is to be me is taken
away from me, or at least I think it's me
I'm talking about.

But at least I have photos in a suitcase.

Abandoned Mall Stores

Walking in through entrance ways abandoned long ago
Service centers long left empty
Discounted realities long left behind
Bereft, with leaking ceilings
as signatories of capitalist deaths
Easily announced

Drip drip drip
as the stores stop shopping
dropping like flies
you know that it's obvious.

Retail tales entail emails
from executives entailing tales
of economic realities explaining
of brick and mortar deaths
physicality seen as economically
unfeasable.

My Last Breath

Stick those sticks into my soul
Inflict me to my dying day
Face me with an effaced reality
which even God would turn away

Don't you dare avoid the obvious
tension of what's there before your eyes

Speaking spittle into my eyes
isn't what I bargained for,
you see it for yourself
truth be told

Hells bells, it's the story
of my life,
told from far too long

A story well we all know well.

The breathes are shorter now
Heaving and shallow
I thought this ground was supposed to be
hallowed

Hallowed by thy name
Hallowed be thy name
Hallowed by thy name

The Witch

If only you could watch
a Majesty awry
Mentioning a voice
A Voice, a voice.

Visionaries bestial
connected. Vestigial
investigations.

Sure. So sure.
So empirically sure.
Slippery as silk.


Certainty, certainty.
Certainty, certainty.
Surety, insane.

She's not safe anymore,
conjuring
configuring
unsure,

Strangely sure.

Levant

A tissue of lies
Never tired
of tiring of lies
plied towards compliance

Issues none of which
existed.
Senselessly expressed
tested to ends unknown.

Perpetually true
yet not
unfortunate
Ann Frank kinda late.

Shh... Don't talk
can't speak
gonna speak cuz I can't ignore
You and me.

Speak, spoken.

Complicated Sentences

Surreal realities
interact
my realities.

Grammar
never let me go.
Fuck the present.

Intersectionality
is such a lovely sentence
Left alone, bereft.

Poetry is complex
sometimes
never enough. Yet,
my only language.

It's OK, I still Love You

I understand your anger
at least I think I do.
Anger expressed
It's totally understandable.

Go figure.

Yet I still love you.

Breathing in, breathing out
Existential expressions
Expressed.

Fundamentals.
Understandable expressions
Grammar understood.

And yet I still love you.

Go figure.

I still love you.

Wounds not withstanding.

I see you in myself.

No Blood No Flag

Heritage notwithstanding
Germanic ancestry obvious
by my last name. I'm a mutt nonetheless
ancestrally mixed
nixing the pick of the litter.

The flag lifted high
exalting the standard
of the Tribe extolled.
Blood and Flag bleed into each other
mixed and insecure
fluid and impure.

Colors discolored
as stars fall from the sky.
Flagging before our eyes.
Lying to us with ties
which bind far too easily.

Tight

I can't breathe.

I can't turn.

Oh bother, it's the truth.

No Pooh Bear can ever refrain from your refrain.

Your grip grips me around my neck.

A necklace of chains gripping me like a lover who hates me.

It's almost like you're an American lover.

Understanding Conspiracy Theorists Part 1

As I was researching various extremist hate sites like the falsely named "Jews for Palestinian Right of Return", most of which are run by the same people registering multiple sites which constantly reference each other in order to build a false legitimacy, it occurred to me that there's a slight but very significant difference between being a legitimate detective and being a fringe conspiracy theorist.

It's all about seeing patterns for what they actually are versus seeing patterns which aren't really there. The difference is one of degree, not of kind. But it ends up turning reality on its head, making the true, false, and the false, true. But how do we tell the difference between the two? That's the $64,000 question.

I think some key terms should be named here as we go forward:

Cognitive Bias

Epistemology

Research Methods

Gnosticism or Secret Knowledge

Logical Fallacies

False Conspiracy Theories

Criminal Conspiracies

Obviously this is a huge issue which one Facebook post isn't going to adequately address, but we can at least try to start the process of understanding what false conspiracy theories are and how people process information in ways that inoculate them from believing in them or towards believing in them.

In other words, this is both a cognitive issue as well as a sociological issue. I personally don't care much about individual conspiracy theories as much as I do about why and how people come to believe in them. Some are quite harmless, like not believing we landed on the Moon, while others are incredibly dangerous, like the anti vaccination conspiracy theory which costs people's lives.

Also, as I posted above, there are real criminal conspiracies which have happened many times throughout history and to this day, such as Watergate, Tuskegee medical experiments, the Holocaust, etc. So I'm not in any way saying that no conspiracies have ever happened. That's a charge which is typically laid down by fake conspiracy theorists in order to discredit anyone who disagrees with them. That, by the way, is itself, a classic logical fallacy. That's why I put the term in the list above.

Anyway, this post is already too long and I've got a lot more to address about these phenomena, which I'll be writing on my blog, and then posting here and on Twitter. This has been a lifelong interest of mine, primarily because I come from a family which leaned/leans heavily towards conspiratorial ways of thinking, and I learned early on how dangerous that is on multiple levels, not just cognitively, but emotionally and spiritually as well.

Lastly, the takeaway from all of this is this:

It's OK to not know everything. You'll be fine with your limited knowledge.

Whispers in the Night Air

Stop kissing me with your poison tongue
I don't need that kind of love
Some lisps I love, but not this lisp
Whisper into someone else's ears

You know I love my Icons
Holy and unholy
Reflections of my
fractured self

Bastard child of the Holy One
Slingshot sanctification
Unseen yet Wholly seen

Chord Structures

Breaking out of the trance is never easy.
Chord structures must be broken out of
over and over again
till the Siren is not silenced
but replaced by a better voice.