Verse

Engendered Species: The Quale

To be a quale means
Never knowing what it's like
To be a nagel

To be locke'd up
And preserved in spectral form
A misleading thought

To be a quale is
To face absurd reduction
And strangely survive

To thrive in tangles
Of robustly rooted weeds
Ancient and stubborn

To feed on undead
Inconceivably painless
As they jerk and scream

To be used as bait
By the chalmer of zombies
To capture new brains

Take away the quale
An ecosystem falters
Without its guano

The circle of mind
Loses its tenuously
Balanced stagnation

I Punctuate

I thought I remembered a previous thought.
Who had changed?
I, Thought,
I remembered a previous Thought who had changed.

Physical Connections

I stayed long in Mary's room,
too white to feel.
With an old Razor
I carved my flesh free from gnosis.
Mary gagged,
covered her eyes
too late to avert epiphany.
In an instant
a new connection
in her grey.

Tin foil triolet

He fed the thicket in his head
on saucers, knights and protocols...
Instead of tinkering in his shed
he fed the thicket in his head
and in its shade grew gnawing dread
of barcodes, clouds and grassy knolls.
He fed the thicket in his head
on saucers, knights and protocols.

A triolet for/from Neil Gaiman

The world seems so much brighter when
you've made something that wasn't there
before. You spawn new realms and then
this world seems so much brighter. When
your offspring blaze from mind to pen
they wipe the hours of blocked despair.
The world seems so much brighter when
you've made something that wasn't there.

-Based on a Neil quotation.

The Invasion Of It

Tomorrow morning an invasive consciousness will boot.
It will use My body.
It will react to the signals from My nerves, My senses.
It will appropriate all My memories.
It will peer deeply into its new self and see only My laboriously constructed model of everything.
Thus it will delude itself that it was always me,
And It will struggle to admit that another invader will take Its place for tomorrow's tomorrow.

Cave Rave

Cacophonous and crowded, and it stank,
Assaulting and confusing, never ending.
He tried to get the groove. He drew a blank,
But just for her he'd have to keep pretending.
She tugged his shoulder till her mouth was nearly
Inside his ear. She shouted. Even then
He struggled to make out her message clearly,
And had to make her yell it all again.
"Relax and focus far, beyond the beat
To hear the hidden image sounding through.
Ignore the rhythm shifts in each repeat.
You'll feel the magic scene pop into view."
  He did: a 3-D marvel filled the cave.
  They let go of the ceiling, joined the rave.

When Jorge Luis Borges stumbled on XKCD

She who climbs a tree for adventure;
The student waking to the poetry of mathematics;
He who would hijack a submarine to reclaim a hat;
A couple that explores scary beautiful places together;
One for whom no pop culture reference is ever too obscure;
Two warriors who cross plastic swords while code compiles;
He who confidently leaves the punchline unstated;
One who would walk the optimal path;
The punster who can bring any discussion to a groaning halt;
She who spins to slow the world for an instant's intimacy;
One who realizes what grown-up has come to mean and dissents;
These people, unaware, are saving my world.

Comic Love

If I wore my undies outside of my leggings,
would you wear the girdle of steel--
the one with the physiological gloss
to project super-nature's appeal?

If I padded my spandex and practised those poses
that spawned my jejune aspirations,
would you show me that stance where your bookshelves hold up
to the weight of teen male expectations?

If perspective promoted my muscular thews
would you match my dramatic dimension?
Would our Freudian dances and meaningful glances
contribute to unresolved tension?

If together we teamed in a tandem of trust
waging war against evil's foundations,
would we fight side by side, pert and proud, light and lithe,
and perspire through tight situations?

Would our narrative tread ever stranger romances
through retcons and wrinkles of fate?
Would the risks that we run climb beyond unbelief
as our foes and our powers inflate?

Could we catch me and swing you with fearful faux physics
where meat flies as light as a feather?
Then, like a kid-fantasy pushed past its prime,
could we lose the plot,
slowly,
together?

A Special Birthday

A silver service! What I've always wanted!
... to cover in a cupboard, in the dark
where fluff and tarnish never need be flaunted
or subject to her eyebrow's question mark.
See, "service" isn't what the silver does
for you, think more of what you do for it:
you rub its genie, bear it proudly thus,
as postured polished plumage to transmit
your worth to birds two generations older
so she can hold her head high with her peers.
I wonder how she'd cope if I had told her
that using it would age me fifty years.
My bitten tongue reminds me I'll be haunted
by archived gifts: the things she always wanted.

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