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What is Hive Being, and Why the Name?
You have likely heard talk of a hive mind, where one global mind finds more or less figurative expression in various local minds. Such talk is common enough in nature documentaries, especially ones concerning ants or bees, and in sci-fi programs. Take that notion, at least a loose version of it, and broaden its scope. That will be a decent first step in understanding the title I have chosen both for my Blog and for the first five-volume installment of my magnum opus Made For You and Me, a fragmentary collection of minimalist stanzas from 2016 to 2020.
In alignment with Spinoza (the 17th Century Rationalist to whom I devoted my doctoral studies), I view reality in its totality as a grand hive Being: all entities are but pulsating manifestations of the buckstopping fount of everything, an ultimate being we might call “God” or “Nature” (so long as, out of respect for the capital “G” and the capital “N,” we limit it neither to some anthropomorphic cloud father hurling lightning bolts nor to mere wilderness untouched by human smog). According to the hive-Being view (where reality is one lone superorganism, a monistic—and we might even say unividualist—conception I defend in both my creative and academic capacities), each non-foundational being (each being, that is, whose essence does not involve existence) is an utterly necessitated expression or eruption or exudation of this eternal source—each is, perhaps better put, a mode or manner of being, and so a focal point through which is disclosed, what classical theists sometimes call “being itself” (ipsum esse subsistens): the realness of the real, the being of whatever may be, the sheer activity of being, the very isness of whatever is. This Blog, which duplicates my Substack, throbs as but one among many literary unfurlings of this self-necessitated foundation, this supreme wellspring, of which we—like black holes and broken beliefs, like fractal ferns and flickering flames—are the inevitable stylings.
My Journey
I am an academic who found himself pressured into early retirement by the rising tides of cancel culture. The illiberal scourge of censoring, silencing, and shaming—although always with us throughout our evolution—reached a local peak around 2021. That was the turbulent year my creative pursuits, which the old left once encouraged as a healthy outlet for the stresses of a childhood steeped in poverty and illiteracy, drew the ire of the new safe-space left. A small cadre of self-proclaimed victims and their allies, several of whom continue to berate me years later under pseudonyms as see through as their sexual infatuation, sought to erase me and my heterodoxy. They found support from a wannabe-woke dean, covered in the grand inquisitor robes of our decadent modernity (full-body tattoos) and just itching to signal his commitment to protecting “vulnerable populations” from triggering material (even if just, as it was in my case, off-duty poems “unbecoming for someone calling himself a teacher”). Although I eventually won my due-process case with the help of The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, I slunk away from a college that turned its back on protecting freedom of expression and from an institution increasingly intolerant of intellectual diversity.
The wrecking ball to my too-comfy office in the windowless ivory tower came with a silver lining. From the ashes of my professional aspirations rose a phoenix of increased freedom to fulfill the literary calling I have pursued for decades. Reputation concerns never stopped me, even within academia’s sterile halls of conformity. Indeed, my unapologetic defiance, which has long baffled friends and family, no doubt chummed even safe waters—almost as if I were asking for it all along—until the cancel shiver grew too frenzied to hold back its blind thrashings. But now, now I piston the most forbidden territories of human thought with no longer even a twinge of conscience. The newfound freedom means extra time to hone my craft. When not assisting special-needs communities (a day job far more rewarding than freeway-flyer drudgeries), I pursue my literary mission with Dionysian fervor.
Call for Co-Conspirators
This space, my digital sanctuary, showcases the fruits of my mission. Think of my posts, even those linking to my publications, as works in progress. I want your input, unflinching brutality included. Each post begins with an invitation to action: “Let’s workshop this [draft about x, y, z].” Your contributions, whether through public comments or my contact page, help hammer scraps of ore into polished blades fit for magazine publication.
Your input is valuable, even if you are neither a writer nor a reader of literature—twin disciplines dying by the cyber nanosecond. Sometimes—even if at the risk of uttering banalities—an outsider’s fresh vantage can pierce the veils of convention to reveal what insiders miss. It often takes an outsider to make us even think to question our ingrained presuppositions and attitudes. I stand by the hygienic value of contagion. That is one reason I advocate so strongly for intellectual diversity and freedom of expression. And that is also one reason I was so harrowed by the anti-diversity swell of cancel culture in academia (an institution that should be the utmost caretaker of such values)—harrowed especially insofar as that swell masqueraded under the gaslighting guise of “diversity”).
You will witness the breathing evolution of my writings over time. To track these changes, I label each revision by round: “ROUND 2,” ROUND 3,” and so forth. Each piece undergoes continuous refinement based on your feedback and my own revisitations. Sometimes changes will mar the work. That is the risk of creative tinkering as a finite creature. I hope you will alert me to missteps. After many semesters of university writing workshops, one rule has impressed itself upon me: when someone senses a flaw, something almost always needs to change—even if, yes, the proposed solution misses the mark (which often it does). From a quick look into the archives, accessible here, you can see how much I have benefited from your feedback so far.
My Hope
Sharing drafts can be daunting. But showing you the ravaged and unperfumed real deal unfiltered by makeup (stuttering starts and falsities, awkward line breaks and clumsy word choices, grammatical errors and misspellings)—that not only makes my work more relatable, but helps me refine things through your input. I hope the unfiltered look at the raw process of fumbling, rather than just the polished product, also helps other writers develop their craft. Imperfect works often instruct more than perfect ones: whereas the perfect ones tend to have a grace by which they slip inside us without activating our scrutiny, the imperfect ones—especially the near perfect ones—show us glaringly what not to do.
People laugh at me, seeing—in my tilting at the windmills of literary excellence—a Don Quixote clunking around in Arthurian armor in a post-knight era. I am not naïve. I am well aware of the diminishing ability to read, let alone well: slowly and deeply, with gratitude. I am also aware that my style, which often nests subpoints within larger points, never waters down virtuosity for the sake of mass appeal. I watch readers stumble over my sentences, unable to unlock even just the music of the envelope let alone the semantic meat within, which—given my tendency to flashlight through the darker facets of human nature (the addicts, the miscreants, the abusers among us)—only adds an additional alienating layer of difficulty). Beholding these depressive scenes of even supportive family members getting bucked off my syntactic bronco makes me feel like a dinosaur who should get a hint and, if not succumb to the brain rot of skibidi-toilet speak, just hang himself already. Even though the decline in linguistic background and grammatical voltage makes my compositions seem quixotic in a world binging Netflix and TikTok, I persist—raging against the dying of the light—by some internal compulsion to celebrate the richness of language and thought.
My hope is that, despite social media’s unparalleled power to farm our attention, people never forget the unique power of writing. Beyond unveiling hypocrisy, teasing out complex implications, and detailing the commonalities between even the most alien phenomena, writing offers something we need today—trapped in agoraphobic cyber bubbles only thickened by the Lyme dangers of forests and the COVID dangers of cities—perhaps more than ever. Granting us rich access to the first-person perspectives of others (to how things feel to them), writing serves as one of humanity’s best tools for combating loneliness. It allows us to linger, broadly and deeply and at high resolution, within the inner lives of others in a way that other arts can only suggest.
What to Expect
My work spans a broad spectrum: from metaphysical discourses on free will and determinism and the ontology of holes to the ephemera of western culture (whether the childhood impacts of the hypersexual mono-image of black woman as squirting twerkers or Terrence Howard’s sham revolution of mathematics). Some tight and minimal, others free-flowing sprawls; some heady and abstract, others emotional and imagistic—my inkwell musings, which often blend scholarly rigor with a dark humor from both high and low culture, aim to capture the visceral intensity of our personal and social and ultimately existential predicaments.
By no means can I deny that drug abuse, sexual assault, and the tales of the broken and the damned loom large in the tag cloud of my work. My writing will never be a paradise of easy truths and comforting lies. It will challenge you, provoke you, and at times even repulse you. I offer no apologies for the monsters I unleash. They are as much a part of us, at long root scared rodent mammals scurrying in the shadows of dinosaurs, as our noblest aspirations.
But make no mistake. It is not all downer darkness. The archives are my receipts. You will find pieces exploring the pursuit of authenticity in a media-saturated world, the search for meaning in an indifferent cosmos, and the celebration of beauty in both the sublime and the profane. I locate much of my inspiration, in fact, in novelists like Dostoevsky and poets like Ted Kooser—writers unafraid to pursue moral agendas or risk Hallmark sentimentality in an age that often sneers at sincerity.
Be they satirical dissections of modern social dynamics or poignant poems about addiction or academic articles on moral responsibility, my goal is to provoke thought, evoke emotion, and foster meaningful dialogue. Fear has not and will not stop me from challenging humanity’s fundamental taboos (like bestiality and cannibalism) or self-reflecting into the dark chaos of the subconscious, even if that means exposing the Jungian shadows—the inner Goebbels—lurking within us all!
Expect posts each day, no day missed. Donations are welcome, but I impose no paywall: it feels wrong to charge for art, especially given our date with obliteration. Feel free to explore what amounts to, at the time of writing this, close to a thousand pieces of poetry and prose here. That should give you a sense of what awaits.
Join me—specula holstered—on this literary odyssey into the public and private nooks of the hive Being. Let us navigate the labyrinth of creation together, confronting our demons and even slaying our darlings if we must. Let us dance on the razor’s edge between the sublime and the profane in pursuit of an elusive literary perfection never to be confused—as it has been confused in our declining civilization—with the pursuit of popularity or likeability over truth.
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MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 80)
This fragment, “MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 80),” continues the sequence’s mosaic method, assembling a field of observations that orbit agency, status, perception, and the instability of value. Rather than advancing a single argument, the stanza works by juxtaposition: each line reframes the previous one, creating a shifting terrain where moral, social, and existential claims are constantly tested against their opposites.
One dominant thread is the unreliability of interpretive frameworks. The opening line’s critique of the “unreliable narrator” label suggests that critical categories can sometimes function as shortcuts that neutralize difficult or taboo material rather than engage it. This concern recurs in different guises: “mental models of the world are as real as what we see through their filter,” and “language reflects, constrains, and liberates consciousness.” Together, these lines propose that perception is always mediated, and that the tools used to understand reality can both reveal and distort it.
A second thread involves status, resentment, and hierarchy. Lines such as “robbing them… because it kills you inside to know… they are better than you” and “witnessing your sibling’s life take off… leaving you behind” explore how comparisons generate both aspiration and hostility. The fragment repeatedly returns to the psychological effects of inequality—not only material but symbolic, embedded in language, demeanor, and cultural capital. Even acts framed as altruistic (“lifting the lowest up”) are recast as potentially leveling forces, suggesting a suspicion of systems that redistribute status under the guise of care.
The stanza also engages with moral responsibility and determinism. The line about mental illness undermining responsibility while preserving belief in it captures a tension: acknowledging causal constraints on behavior threatens the very idea of moral agency, yet people maintain that belief to preserve a sense of order. This is reinforced by the broader suggestion that “nothing we do is ultimately up to us,” placing human action within a network of forces that complicates blame and praise alike.
Another recurring motif is excess leading to inversion. The observation about perfume dulling the nose and acquisition dulling pleasure articulates a general principle: overindulgence produces its opposite, driving one back toward restraint. This logic appears elsewhere in subtler forms—performance anxiety dissolved into apathy, charity becoming burdensome, repetition turning stability into stagnation. The stanza suggests that many human pursuits contain within them the seeds of their own reversal.
The fragment also includes moments of sharp social satire, particularly around contemporary cultural practices and discourses. The critique of groups using privilege to assert marginalization echoes earlier parts of the sequence, while lines about replacing clapping with snapping fingers or “bubble hopping” via apps point to a world increasingly mediated by performative norms and technological intervention. These moments are not isolated jokes but part of a broader pattern: the sense that modern life is saturated with constructed behaviors that both express and obscure underlying realities.
Finally, the closing lines return to isolation and epistemic vulnerability. Avoiding psychologists out of fear of suggestibility, feeling unable to enter the lives of strangers—these images suggest a subject who is both hyper-aware of interpretive frameworks and uncertain of any stable ground. The result is a kind of suspended state: aware of the mechanisms shaping thought and behavior, yet unable to step outside them.
Taken together, part 80 presents a world in which meaning is contingent, status is unstable, and perception is always mediated. Its mosaic structure allows contradictions to coexist without resolution, inviting the reader to navigate a landscape where certainty is repeatedly undermined but never entirely abandoned.
Meta Description:
A mosaic poem exploring perception, status, and moral responsibility through juxtaposed reflections on modern life, revealing the instability of meaning and value.
Keywords:
mosaic poetry, perception, status, determinism, social critique, excess, moral responsibility, language, hive Being
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 79)
This fragment from Made for You and Me 2: hive Being (2017—part 79) extends the sequence’s mosaic method into a dense field of reflections on origin, agency, desire, and the limits of human perspective. The stanzas move rapidly across registers—evolutionary, psychological, economic, erotic, and theological—yet they are held together by a persistent pressure: how much of what we take to be “ours” (our thoughts, loves, identities, judgments) is actually conditioned, inherited, or misperceived?
A first organizing thread is deep time and shared origin. The line “none of us has to go far back before getting to an Ethiopian” collapses contemporary divisions into a common ancestry, placing identity within an evolutionary horizon that undermines rigid boundaries. This gesture recurs in subtler ways: our “brains not wired to grasp deep time,” our susceptibility to statistical illusion, our tendency to center ourselves (“as if you really are / the axis of this bitch”). The fragment repeatedly exposes how cognitive limits distort scale, whether temporal, probabilistic, or cosmic.
Running alongside this is a concern with the source of thought and selfhood. “Why does there have to be a master / calling up the thoughts that come / from the you-know-not-where?” questions the intuition of a central controller. Psychedelics “foreground what is normally background,” suggesting that ordinary consciousness is a filtering mechanism rather than a transparent window. The self appears less as origin than as site of arrival, a receiver of processes it only partially governs.
The piece also interrogates moral and social performance. Positive-thinking culture that induces guilt in illness, the “bigot card” as conversational shutdown, the way others must “participate in your self-image”—these lines examine how norms are enforced not just externally but internally. Forgiveness, even in extreme cases, is reframed as possibly “self-interested grace,” complicating the moral purity often ascribed to it. Throughout, the poem resists easy moral binaries, showing how virtue can be entangled with need, strategy, or self-preservation.
Desire is treated with similar ambivalence. It ranges from the intimate tenderness of “the beloved’s hand… in your coat pocket” to the abstraction of longing for what is “unreceptive even were it not wrong to fill.” The fragment suggests that desire often overshoots reality, attaching itself to impossibility, taboo, or projection. Even safer forms—“an undercurrent affair… in daydream and flirt form”—are valued for their imaginative charge rather than their fulfillment. Desire becomes less about satisfaction than about the shape it gives to attention and time.
Another recurring theme is economics and constraint: prison gambling with ramen, graduating into unaffordable services, lawyers as life-altering but inaccessible, countries importing garbage for fuel. These images ground the more abstract reflections in material conditions, reminding us that agency is unevenly distributed. Even identity and belief are shown to be shaped by circumstance—diasporic communities freezing culture while the homeland evolves, remote populations consumed by distant threats via television.
The fragment’s theological questions sharpen these concerns. Why would a god care about uniforms? What kind of being demands reassurance or belief? Such lines echo earlier parts of the sequence, reframing religion not as settled doctrine but as a field of ethical scrutiny. At the same time, the poem acknowledges the psychological pull of belief—nostalgia, fear, community—without reducing it to mere error.
Finally, the closing images return to pattern and repetition: the pull of old relationships, the drift into behavior one would not normally choose (“enter the broken window as well”), the quiet accumulation of absence (“dishes and clothes continue to pile up since she left”). Life appears as a series of grooves—habits, attachments, perceptions—that guide action often more than deliberation does.
What unifies part 79 is its refusal to grant any single domain—biology, culture, reason, or will—final authority. Each line opens a perspective only to place it under pressure from another. The result is a portrait of human life as distributed, contingent, and perpetually mis-scaled, where meaning emerges not from stable foundations but from the friction between competing frames.
Meta Description:
A mosaic of aphoristic reflections exploring deep time, identity, desire, and moral perception, revealing how human thought and value are shaped by limits of perspective and condition.
Keywords:
mosaic poetry, identity, deep time, consciousness, desire, moral psychology, social norms, theology, economic constraint, perception
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 78)
This fragment from Made for You and Me 2: hive Being (2017—part 78) continues the mosaic’s accumulation of aphoristic pressures, but with a particularly sharp emphasis on identity, value, and the instability of what we take to be real or worth pursuing. The lines move restlessly between metaphysics, social observation, mortality, and self-deception, producing a field in which no grounding principle remains secure for long.
A central current in this section is the problem of what constitutes the self. The question—“is the corpse more or less him / than the collage of memories / retained in the surrounding criers?”—functions as a conceptual anchor. It destabilizes any simple identification of the person with either the physical body or the social afterimage. The self becomes distributed, neither fully present in the remains nor fully preserved in memory. This concern echoes in the earlier line imagining “one being, with discrete centers of self-consciousness,” suggesting that even within a single organism, unity may be more apparent than real. The fragment repeatedly undermines the idea of a stable, singular identity.
Closely tied to this is the theme of misvaluation and misplaced investment. The warning to “build your identity around something / with a shelf life less than your own life” reframes mortality as a kind of training: attaching oneself to what will perish prepares one, paradoxically, for one’s own end. Similarly, the observation that truth claims may hold value “even with no grounding, just as money can” exposes the pragmatic dimension of belief. What matters is not always truth in a strict sense, but utility, circulation, and shared acceptance. Institutions “baptize” received views not to discover truth but to sustain themselves, revealing belief as an instrument of continuity rather than correspondence.
The fragment also returns to a recurring tension between awe and demystification. Genius, when misconstrued as effortless, removes the competitive impulse and allows enjoyment—yet this same misconstrual erases the labor behind creation. A virus becomes a “Kubrick monolith,” both banal and transcendent, its mechanical replication reinterpreted as cosmic signal. These gestures elevate the ordinary while simultaneously exposing the arbitrariness of such elevation. The sacred and the mundane are shown to be interchangeable frames rather than distinct categories.
Another strong thread is the critique of ego and self-presentation. The figure who mocks designer brands while flaunting “busy” as status reveals how identity simply shifts its markers without escaping the underlying need for distinction. The “ego shaky due to its awareness of being semi-literate” captures a more internal version of this instability: self-consciousness erodes confidence, producing a fragile identity constantly threatened by its own limitations.
The section’s engagement with religion is especially pointed. Several lines interrogate the logic of worship, suggesting that a being who demands belief under threat, or who values belief over moral action, would be ethically suspect. The idea that “only a devil would like those who believe in him for fear of torture otherwise” reframes piety as coercion. The closing aphorism intensifies this critique by suggesting that the culturally invoked “God-fearing” ideal may align more closely with fear-based domination than with any notion of the good. Across these lines, reverence is stripped of its assumed legitimacy and subjected to moral evaluation.
Memory and nostalgia appear as another destabilizing force. The pull of old songs, even when recognized as hollow, is compared to the persistence of family religion: both endure not because of their truth or richness, but because of their emotional imprint. The dying figure clinging to a childhood promise—“ice cream once you get well”—reduces life’s final horizon to a fragment of early comfort, suggesting that the deepest layers of identity may remain childlike and unresolved.
Finally, the fragment repeatedly poses existential dilemmas without resolving them. “Is it easier to blow your brains out or to reinvent yourself?” is not treated as rhetorical flourish but as a genuine impasse, reflecting the difficulty of transformation relative to cessation. Likewise, the notion that one’s “life continued even though his story seemed to have come to an end” captures the disjunction between narrative closure and lived persistence. Life exceeds the frameworks through which we attempt to make sense of it.
What unifies part 78 is its relentless questioning of foundations. Identity, truth, value, belief, and memory are all shown to be contingent, constructed, or misaligned with the realities they claim to represent. The fragment does not replace these with new certainties. Instead, it leaves the reader in a space where meaning must be negotiated without guarantees, where even the most basic categories—self, truth, God, worth—remain open to revision.
Meta Description:
This fragment from Made for You and Me 2: hive Being (2017—part 78) explores identity, value, belief, and mortality through aphoristic reflections that destabilize truth, selfhood, and religious authority.
Keywords:
mosaic poetry, aphoristic philosophy, identity, memory, belief, religion critique, value theory, existential reflection, selfhood, mortality
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 77)
This fragment from Made for You and Me 2: hive Being (2017—part 77) continues the mosaic’s method of assembling aphoristic shards into a portrait of modern consciousness under pressure. The lines do not build a single argument so much as accumulate around recurring tensions: agency and dependence, memory and self-mythology, labor and waste, reverence and moral revolt. The result is a philosophical field in which private anguish, cultural memory, bodily discipline, erotic risk, and theological judgment coexist without hierarchy.
One of the strongest currents in this section is the question of what kind of being one is in relation to one’s own life. The opening line—“are you the root that finds the water or the leaf that catches the light?”—immediately frames existence in terms of receptivity, function, and positional difference. The self may be active seeker or passive receiver, hidden sustainer or visible surface. That question quietly governs much of what follows. Some lines imagine people straining toward mastery—lifting weights, trying to out-train a bad diet, racing home to intervene in catastrophe—while others emphasize how much is already determined by context, by panic, by the structure of one’s relationships, by the body’s limits, or by the slow erasures of disease.
The piece is especially interested in the instability of memory and the ethics of repetition. “By repeating it, are you preserving the memory of your tragedy or laundering it?” is one of the fragment’s central questions. It captures the suspicion that narration can both honor and sanitize, that the act of keeping something alive through language may also make it cleaner, more presentable, less true to its original violence. This concern echoes in the line about nostalgia for a moment in which one was already nostalgic for another moment. Memory becomes recursive, layered, and increasingly detached from the original lived experience. The self risks inhabiting not the past, but past versions of its own retrospective feelings about the past.
Another significant thread is the relation between worthwhile care and disguised cruelty. The line about “helping / the senile unscramble memories for an afternoon” is especially subtle. It asks whether the helper’s sense of doing good may coexist with a more troubling pleasure or imposition. That ambiguity runs through other lines as well: opening up one’s pitiableness only to someone who cannot judge; being paired from the start with someone already inclined to leave; taking each other’s medicines; wasting a day off in dread of work. Human care is repeatedly shown as compromised by need, asymmetry, projection, and fatigue. Yet the fragment never reduces such acts to bad faith. It simply refuses to let them remain innocent.
The section’s treatment of worship and divinity forms its clearest argumentative cluster. The last four aphorisms are variations on a single moral interrogation: could a being who demands reassurance, punishes disbelief amid evidential scarcity, or values doctrinal belief above the suffering of innocents ever be worthy of worship? These lines are powerful because they relocate the question of God from metaphysics to moral psychology. The issue is not whether such a being exists, but whether, if such a being existed, reverence would be fitting. The fragment thus turns traditional piety inside out. Worship is no longer assumed as the proper response to power; it must be ethically earned. This line of thought is prepared earlier by the claim that a being who created us for worship would already be suspect. Reverence is subjected to the same scrutiny as all the fragment’s other human arrangements.
Elsewhere, the poem continues its characteristic mingling of the abject, the comic, and the historically grave. A subway performer booed to tears, children sketching bomb damage, poetry in the pocket of an SS soldier, a Chaucer scholar who is also a serial rapist—these juxtapositions expose the instability of moral categories and the insufficiency of cultural polish. Refinement, talent, scholarship, and sentiment do not protect against cruelty. Likewise, brutality does not erase the strange presence of beauty, memory, or aspiration. The fragment persistently resists clean separation between civilization and barbarism.
The lines about risky behavior in a “zoo of cut-off domestication” offer another key insight. Affairs, gambling, and other self-endangering acts are presented less as deviance than as attempts to generate intensity inside an overcontained life. This links the fragment’s erotic, occupational, and existential themes. The wasted workday, the desire to write great verse, the front-yard weightlifting, the remembered VCR cart of substitute-teacher reprieve—all point to a life oscillating between routine and the desperate need to puncture routine. Risk becomes one of the last available solvents of deadened time.
What unifies the fragment, then, is not topic but pressure. Every line asks, in one form or another, whether our repetitions, attachments, and ideals are preserving life or laundering it; whether our efforts are forms of agency or symptoms of entrapment; whether the beings and systems we serve are worthy of that service. In that sense, part 77 is among the more overtly philosophical sections of the sequence. It does not merely register the textures of modern life; it subjects them to judgment.
Meta Description:
This fragment from Made for You and Me 2: hive Being (2017—part 77) examines agency, memory, labor, risky behavior, and the moral conditions of worship through a mosaic of aphoristic reflections.
Keywords:
mosaic poetry, aphoristic poetry, memory and repetition, agency, worship, moral philosophy, nostalgia, labor, risky behavior, existential reflection
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 76)
This fragment from Made for You and Me 2: hive Being (2017—part 76) continues the mosaic’s method of assembling aphoristic shards into a portrait of modern consciousness under pressure. The lines do not build a single argument so much as accumulate around recurring tensions: desire and misrecognition, intimacy and substitution, skepticism and residual belief, mortality and the small rituals by which we avoid confronting it. The effect is that of a mind moving quickly across registers—philosophical, social, psychological—without fully settling into any one frame.
One of the strongest currents in this section is the instability of desire, especially the tendency to mistake general hunger for particular destiny. The line distinguishing obsession with intimacy from obsession with “that one particular woman” is central. It reframes romantic fixation as misattribution, a projection that grants uniqueness to what may in fact be interchangeable. This destabilization echoes in the dinner-party scene, where what once felt like singular connection—shared “factoids,” private charm—is revealed as reproducible performance. The recognition is not merely social but epistemic: what one took to be meaningful may have been generic all along.
The text also develops a persistent tension between skepticism and lingering belief. Dismissing astrology does not entail dismissing cosmic influence; fearing AI does not preclude a strange parental investment in it. These juxtapositions suggest that modern consciousness does not operate through clean binaries but through layered, often contradictory commitments. One may reject a system intellectually while still inhabiting its intuitions at an affective level.
Moments of mortality and absurdity puncture human self-importance throughout. Children mocking a corpse, collectors cremated with their art, the “career move” of dying young—each instance exposes the fragility of the narratives through which people secure meaning. Yet the piece resists pure cynicism. The observation that early awareness of loneliness may open the possibility of deeper companionship indicates a parallel movement toward revaluation rather than simple negation.
Language and communication emerge as quieter but significant concerns. The suggestion that nuanced language requires an audience capable of receiving it points to a broader condition of fragmentation: expressive capacity persists, but shared frameworks for interpretation erode. In such a context, even refined thought risks collapsing into inarticulacy—reduced, as the text puts it, to “humans screaming wordless sounds.”
The final lines return to the problem of self-awareness without transformation. Recognizing one’s own patterns—obsession, deferral, performative apology—does not dissolve them. Instead, awareness becomes folded into the cycle itself, as when apology serves not to end desire but to rekindle it. The result is a portrait of consciousness that is lucid yet entrapped: capable of diagnosing its own conditions while remaining bound to them.
Meta Description:
This fragment from Made for You and Me 2: hive Being (2017—part 76) examines deferred desire, misrecognized intimacy, and the paradox of self-awareness that fails to produce change.
Keywords:
mosaic poetry, desire, intimacy, misrecognition, self-awareness, modern consciousness, aphorisms, existential reflection
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 74)
This installment continues the mosaic’s accumulation of fragments, but here the governing pressure feels even more explicitly epistemic: how do we know what we know, and what forces—biological, social, technological—shape what we take to be true, good, or real? The poem moves restlessly between registers—ecological, domestic, philosophical, conspiratorial—yet the throughline is a mind trying to orient itself amid competing scripts, inherited instincts, and mediated realities.
The opening line about retreating sea ice immediately establishes a cold, almost brutal lens: even catastrophe can be reframed as “selection,” trimming the weak. That tone of ruthless reframing echoes throughout. Personal habits (“tossing and turning over mishaps long dead,” returning to exes for transitional comfort) sit alongside broader critiques of self-curation—especially the line about “curating confirmation from social media followers,” which captures a culture in which validation is no longer internal but algorithmically echoed back. The “black mirror” becomes both literal screen and symbolic scrying device: a modern oracle that reflects not truth but compulsive self-checking.
One of the most striking passages concerns the “nurturer” who, aware of both primal human needs (“apes / crave tribal nods”) and the impossibility of any voice escaping echo, nonetheless adopts “prefab scripts.” This is one of the poem’s central tensions: even when we recognize the artificiality of our narratives—religious, ideological, therapeutic—we still rely on them. The phrase “prōtē archē” (first principle) suggests a lost or abandoned attempt to ground meaning anew, replaced instead by inherited or mass-produced frameworks.
The poem repeatedly returns to perspectival limitation. “Tell it slant” is not merely an allusion but a thesis: that distortion is unavoidable when perspectives diverge so radically. This is reinforced by questions about instinct (“Throw stones at the sunning snake” vs. “Feel ashamed for such cruelty”), suggesting that even moral intuitions may be layered—older impulses coexisting with newer ethical overlays. The self becomes less a unified agent than a crossroads of competing inheritances.
Several lines probe institutional and social contradictions. The mention of power differentials in delayed romantic pursuit satirizes retroactive ethical framing. The question about holding Jews to a higher standard exposes tensions in identity-based moral reasoning. The jab at activist groups “manufacturing” threats to sustain relevance reflects skepticism toward institutional incentives. Whether one agrees with these claims is secondary to their function in the poem: they are part of a larger pattern of distrust toward systems that claim moral authority while operating within economies of attention, funding, and influence.
Technology and mediation continue to loom large. Social media not only curates identity but also destabilizes authenticity—posts meant to signal happiness instead invite suspicion. The speculative fear that even “mistypes on Microsoft Word” could be policed extends this anxiety into the future, where expression itself becomes surveilled and punishable. This aligns with earlier concerns about artists and instructors facing consequences for their work, suggesting a culture increasingly intolerant of deviation.
Amid these critiques, there are also quieter, almost elegiac gestures. The idea of “diagramming how the stars will look / to a later age” evokes a human desire to project meaning forward, to leave a trace that outlives the present. Similarly, the notion that virtuosity still exists beneath the “monocrop of pop art” offers a fragile counterweight to the poem’s otherwise corrosive tone: a belief that depth and excellence persist, even if obscured.
The closing image—sea leopards battling through threat displays rather than actual violence—serves as a kind of biological mirror to human behavior. Much of what appears as conflict may be ritualized signaling, a choreography of intimidation rather than destruction. This resonates with earlier lines about social posturing, ideological signaling, and even gang-like dynamics. Across species, the poem suggests, survival often depends less on truth or substance than on performance.
Taken together, this section deepens the mosaic’s portrait of a consciousness navigating fragmentation. It is a world where instincts, scripts, technologies, and institutions all compete to define reality; where sincerity is suspect, performance is unavoidable, and meaning is both constructed and doubted in the same breath.
Meta Description:
A fragmentary, philosophical mosaic poem exploring perception, social media, instinct, and modern identity through sharp, provocative observations on culture, belief, and mediated reality.
Keywords:
mosaic poetry, modern consciousness, social media critique, epistemology, identity and perspective, cultural satire, philosophy in poetry, technological mediation, fragmented thought, contemporary society
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 73)
This installment continues the mosaic’s method of assembling jagged fragments of thought, image, and aphorism into a kind of psychic cross-section of contemporary life—where the sacred, the trivial, the grotesque, and the philosophical all collide without hierarchy. The opening image—bodily, abject, almost comic in its precision—immediately grounds the piece in material reality, but that grounding is unstable. From there, the poem oscillates between existential dread (“scared enough that your hands have no home”), darkly pragmatic inventories of escape (“gun, rope, brick, river”), and meditations on belief, illusion, and the persistence of narrative in human life.
A key thread running through the sequence is the tension between belief and absurdity. The lines about sightings of Tupac Shakur and Elvis Presley serve not merely as cultural curiosities but as epistemological probes: if people still stake reputations on such claims, perhaps it becomes easier to understand how early followers could have believed in postmortem appearances of figures like Jesus Christ. The poem repeatedly returns to this question of how conviction forms—not as a rational endpoint, but as something entangled with longing, fear, and the need for coherence.
That need for coherence also appears in quieter, more intimate registers. The comfort of hearing footsteps in the apartment above, the melancholy stirred by old sitcom themes, or the strange reassurance of shared inconvenience (“no cellphone reception”) all suggest that meaning is often less about truth than about the alleviation of isolation. Even the line “I just stopped loving him”—acknowledged as explanatorily empty—captures how certain phrases function as emotional closures rather than logical accounts.
Addiction and compulsion form another axis. The need to ingest a drug “to give order to this day,” the delusional hope embedded in improvised substances, and the feedback loop of expectation and dopamine all point to a mind seeking structure in chemical or ritual form. This connects to broader reflections on repetition: life as “macro-mantra chant,” identity dissolving under routine, and the human tendency to replace reality with plans or narratives that feel more palatable.
Social critique surfaces in flashes rather than sustained argument. The contrast between Whole Foods and Walmart gestures toward class signaling and moral posturing, while lines about selective adherence to divine mandates expose the inconsistency in professed belief systems. Similarly, the observation that people only feel they are having a good time after consulting social media highlights a mediated self-awareness that undermines immediacy.
The closing images—spatial displacements like the 50-yard line at midnight or a classroom during prom hours—create a sense of estrangement from familiar environments, as though meaning itself has slipped out of alignment. This estrangement is echoed in the cosmic note about light pollution severing us from the stars, a metaphor for the broader theme: a species cut off from larger contexts, improvising meaning from fragments, rituals, and echoes.
What emerges from the sequence is not a single argument but a field of tensions: belief and doubt, isolation and connection, ritual and randomness, body and abstraction. The poem’s refusal to order these fragments into a hierarchy is itself the point. It mirrors a consciousness navigating overload—where insight, absurdity, and despair coexist without resolution, and where meaning is something we continually construct, even as we suspect its fragility.
Meta Description:
A fragmented, philosophical mosaic poem exploring belief, addiction, isolation, and modern consciousness through sharp aphorisms and cultural references, blending existential insight with social critique.
Keywords:
mosaic poetry, existential themes, belief and illusion, addiction, modern consciousness, fragmented narrative, social critique, philosophy in poetry, isolation and connection, cultural references
Willy the Rooster (ROUND 2)
“Willy the Rooster” is a brief poem that achieves its force through the precision of its framing: it captures a single public figure—a habitual street drunk—at the moment when his nightly theater of rage encounters the reflective presence of a schoolgirl. The title primes a reading in terms of animal emblem and ritualized display. A rooster is noisy, territorial, performative, often combative; “Willy” adds a nickname intimacy that both humanizes and trivializes. The poem, however, refuses easy comedy. It uses the rooster figure not to mock but to illuminate how public masculinity can harden into repetitive performance while still containing, unexpectedly, a kernel of shame.
The wino is “wedged midday between / sidewalk and storefront,” a spatial description that makes him seem both stuck and exposed. “Wedged” implies he belongs nowhere—neither inside commerce nor fully outside it—caught in a narrow margin where public life flows past. The poem then expands his identity across time by specifying what he is “clockwork” in doing: as predictable as a freight train, he throws “asphalt / haymakers at streetlamp shadows / in midnight pain.” The phrasing is loaded with contradictions. His punches are “haymakers,” the most dramatic of swings, yet they land on shadows—unfightable enemies, projections. The violence is thus both real (his body swings, his voice shouts) and futile (there is nothing to hit). The adjective “asphalt” converts the urban ground into an agricultural metaphor’s replacement terrain: haymakers made of city grit rather than farm hay, suggesting how rural archetypes of masculine labor and force have been displaced into the street.
The parenthetical “(shouts folding to mumbles)” compresses intoxication’s arc: bravado that collapses into incoherence. The poem’s temporal structure is therefore a hinge between day and night, between public stillness and nocturnal eruption, between the body’s capacity for grand gesture and its collapse into muttering. This suggests that Willy’s aggression is less a stable identity than a cyclical symptom—pain expressed in the only language available to him.
The closing turn—“hides his face before / the mirrors of a passing schoolgirl”—is where the poem’s moral complexity concentrates. The schoolgirl is described not as an object of desire or threat, but as a “mirror,” a reflective surface that confronts him with himself. The plural “mirrors” is telling: it suggests not only her literal eyes but what she represents—youth, innocence, futurity, social order, the possibility of being seen and judged. In the presence of that gaze, he covers his face. This gesture can be read as shame, as self-protection, as the last remnant of dignity. It complicates the rooster persona: the same man who performs violence at night against shadows cannot bear the daylight reflection of a child.
In this sense, the poem becomes a micro-ethics of visibility. The wino’s nightly violence occurs in a space where he can imagine himself unseen or at least unaccountable—fighting shadows, not people. But the schoolgirl’s passing inserts a human witness whose innocence amplifies his self-awareness. The poem thus refuses to romanticize him as a noble outcast, yet it also refuses to reduce him to mere menace. The face-hiding suggests that even in degradation, there can persist a fragile recognition of wrongness or a longing not to contaminate the young with one’s ruin.
The title’s rooster frame deepens this: roosters strut and crow, but they also have a territorial vulnerability—easily startled, easily exposed. Willy’s midday posture is not triumphant crowing; it is concealment. The poem’s achievement is to locate, in a single gesture, the fissure between performative aggression and submerged shame, between public spectacle and private self-knowledge. It leaves the reader with a portrait that is as sociological as it is lyrical: urban pain ritualized into nightly shadowboxing, interrupted by the unbearable clarity of being reflected in a child’s gaze.
Meta Description:
“Willy the Rooster” is a concise poem portraying a street wino who nightly shadowboxes in drunken pain, yet hides his face when a schoolgirl passes—her gaze functioning as a mirror that triggers shame, dignity, and self-recognition.
Keywords:
urban poetry, alcoholism, public masculinity, shame and visibility, street violence as ritual, shadowboxing, social witness, childhood innocence, homelessness, cyclical pain, emblematic title, lyric realism
My Father's Resume
Michael Anthony Istvan Jr.’s poem "My Father’s Résumé" presents a poignant meditation on family, decay, and the futile attempts to reshape a broken life through the lens of societal expectations. The poem juxtaposes the harsh reality of the father’s existence with the artificial construct of a résumé, revealing deeper truths about identity, worth, and the struggle for validation.
The poem begins with the narrator undertaking the task of typing his father’s résumé, an act that initially seems straightforward but quickly becomes fraught with complexity. The imagery of a "rope tossed into his moldy tent" evokes a sense of rescue or aid, implying that the résumé might serve as a lifeline for the father. This metaphor underscores the father's desperate situation—living in a state of decay, both physically and emotionally, in the woods by the Hudson River. The father's environment is depicted as one of profound neglect and decline, where he has been "digested...into toothless rot" by the unforgiving elements and the passage of time. This vivid description is punctuated by moments of transient distraction and comfort, such as drinking beer and feeding raccoons, which highlight his isolation and resignation.
As the narrator works on the résumé, there is a noticeable shift in tone and focus. The initial aim of making the father "competitive" in the job market leads to embellishments and fabrications, a common practice in résumé writing but one that takes on a deeper significance in this context. The narrator’s efforts to "accentuate the positives with bullshit" and to dig up past jobs and volunteering experiences transform the résumé from a mere document into a symbol of hope and redemption. The process becomes an act of rewriting the father’s life, giving it a semblance of purpose and dignity that contrasts sharply with his current reality.
The line "the single page grew into something more" marks a pivotal moment in the poem. The résumé, initially a practical tool, becomes a narrative of the father’s life, infused with the narrator's desire to affirm his father’s worth. The "starched-collar compilation" is not just a list of jobs and skills; it is a testament to the father's existence, an attempt to construct a narrative of value and achievement. However, this constructed narrative is fragile, as the narrator anticipates the father's reaction. The whispering of the résumé’s optimistic message is overshadowed by the "voices" that "would swiftly bully the song." This suggests an inner turmoil within the father, where the positive affirmations of the résumé are drowned out by the harsh realities and self-doubt that have long plagued him.
Istvan’s "My Father’s Résumé" deftly captures the tension between societal measures of worth and the intrinsic value of a human life. The poem’s exploration of the father’s decline and the narrator’s earnest but ultimately futile attempt to rewrite his father’s story invites readers to reflect on the complexities of identity, validation, and the ways we seek to affirm the worth of those we love. Through its vivid imagery and emotional depth, the poem offers a powerful commentary on the human condition and the often unacknowledged struggles of those who live on the margins of society.
Michael Anthony Istvan Jr., My Father’s Résumé, family, decay, validation, societal expectations, résumé writing, identity, worth, isolation, neglect, redemption, hope, human condition, vivid imagery, emotional depth, struggle for validation, marginalization, human worth.
Exposure
**Exposure** is a haunting exploration of a man’s descent into homelessness and the emotional struggles that accompany his life on the streets. The poem delves into the memories that shape his present, the complex dynamics of his past, and the philosophical justifications he offers himself to make sense of his situation.
The opening lines set a somber tone, with the man hunkered down against the chill of autumn in the back of a strange pickup truck on an unfamiliar road. This transient setting mirrors his internal state, a life of constant movement and disconnection. The memory that comes to him is described as a young one, no more than two weeks old, yet it holds the weight and permanence of a childhood song or a vivid image from his past, like the schoolhouse triangle’s note or a deer strung up in a tree.
The memory is of a mundane yet significant moment: him casting dice alone under a buzzing street lamp. The scene is filled with sensory details—the loud tings against a dumpster, the clear sight of hypers (drug addicts) zipping along the sidewalk, and the smack men desperate for their next fix. These vivid descriptions place the reader in the midst of the urban decay that surrounds him.
The poem then shifts to his introspection, revealing his identity crisis. Despite being neither a hyper nor a hoocher (an alcoholic), he is perceived by outsiders as just another part of the street's chaos. His flannel shirt and baking soda smile mask the internal turmoil and disconnection he feels, both from society and from his former self. The line “he stood for what happens when the ball drops” poignantly encapsulates his fall from stability.
The poem delves deeper into his past, revealing that his current state is a result of a conscious decision, a reaction to the loss of his wife and the disintegration of his previous life. He had once been entrenched in the typical markers of success—late-night arguments, financial investments, family moments. Yet, these no longer hold meaning for him. His homelessness is framed as a quest for adventure, a rejection of the safety and monotony of his past life.
The loss of his wife, who once would have been angered by his choices but now would understand, is a turning point. Her death signifies the end of his old life and the beginning of a new, unanchored existence. His manipulations and attempts to hold onto his past life have lost their efficacy, leaving him with a need to shed the last remnants of his childhood illusions and embrace the raw reality of his situation.
**Exposure** powerfully captures the complexity of homelessness, the internal and external battles faced by those living on the streets, and the deep-seated need for meaning and identity amidst chaos. Through rich imagery and introspective narrative, the poem offers a poignant glimpse into a life unmoored and searching for something beyond conventional boundaries.
That Siren
**That Siren** is a powerful poem that captures the cyclical despair and fleeting empowerment of a man ensnared by alcoholism. Through vivid imagery and evocative language, the poem explores the self-deception and false sense of purpose that sustains the man's existence.
The poem begins with the striking image of a horse, polished-hooved but reeking of piss, clopping away from its spot on the corner. This juxtaposition of cleanliness and filth sets the tone for the man's own condition. The horse, a symbol of strength and dignity, contrasts sharply with the man's degraded state.
The man, described as "nuzzled into the city-block curb," is portrayed as a figure of utter desolation. His action of raising a tin cup to the neon lights suggests a futile plea for help or recognition. The "neon eyes" above his "adamant feet" evoke a sense of stubbornness and entrenchment in his situation, highlighting the unyielding nature of his despair.
The physical need to urinate, triggered by his own thoughts, underscores the man's lack of control over his own body and life. The phrase "easy empowerment" reveals the man's internal justification for his actions, as he convinces himself that he is merely "gathering fuel" for some future purpose. This self-deception is personified by "that siren," a seductive force that lures him into making the streets his home.
**That Siren** poignantly depicts the struggles of a man caught in the grips of alcoholism, finding false comfort in the belief that his actions have a greater purpose. Through its rich imagery and exploration of self-deception, the poem offers a deep and empathetic look at the complexities of addiction and despair.
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Don’t let anyone tell you that real life is lacking in poetic interest. This is exactly what the poet is for: he has the mind and the imagination to find something of interest in everyday things. Real life supplies the motifs, the points that need to be said—the actual heart of the matter; but it is the poet’s job to fashion it all into a beautiful, animated whole. You are familiar with Fürnstein, the so-called “nature poet”? He has written a poem about growing hops, and you couldn’t imagine anything nicer. I have now asked him to write some poems celebrating the work of skilled artisans, in particular weavers, and I am quite sure he will succeed; he has lived among such people from an early age, he knows the subject inside out, and will be in full command of his material. That is the advantage of small works: you need only choose subjects that you know and have at your command. With a longer poetic work, however, this is not possible. There is no way around it: all the different threads that tie the whole thing together, and are woven into the design, have to be shown in accurate detail. Young people only have a one-sided view of things, whereas a longer work requires a multiplicity of viewpoints—and that’s where they come unstuck.—Goethe (Conversations with Eckermann)
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