Part 88 operates under a dominant frequency that distinguishes it from the broader cultural scanning of its companion installments. Where the mosaic form typically distributes attention across the full horizontal range of contemporary experience — politics, technology, race, economics, theology — this installment turns more persistently inward and downward, toward dying, toward the child-self, toward the specific textures of grief, bodily humiliation, estrangement, and the narrow windows in which human beings actually reach each other. Death here is not a subject among subjects but a medium: the element through which nearly every other observation is refracted. The sequence's implicit argument is that a culture without dying-literacy — a term the poem will coin and immediately ironize — mismanages nearly everything downstream from it.

"Sensing the dinosaur in the parrot eye" opens with one of the sequence's most compressed and beautiful observations. It is paleontologically grounded — birds carry the evolutionary inheritance of theropod dinosaurs, the parrot's eye retains that lineage — but the poem deploys this as phenomenological event rather than scientific fact. "Sensing" is the crucial verb: not knowing, not seeing, but the more uncertain and intuitive apprehension of something that cannot be proven and cannot be unfelt. Deep time becomes suddenly visible in the quotidian. The image establishes the sequence's governing temporal mode: the past is not past, evolutionary and geological depth is present in ordinary surfaces, and attention — genuine attention — can crack open into duration far exceeding the human. This is also the poem's implicit claim about its own aphoristic method: the fragment, attending to the apparently trivial, can access something ancient.

"Apologizing to people for crying in front of them" follows with a shift from the cosmological to the acutely social. The apology performs the culture's management of emotional display: tears require explanation, and the explanation takes the form of an apology because the crier has, by cultural convention, imposed something on the witness. The stanza names this without satirizing it — the apology is genuine, the discomfort is real, the convention is internalized. It belongs to a loose cluster across the sequence of observations about the management of feeling under social pressure: the half-hour window before paternal stupor, the children's clothing inked for body identification, the cell check and the torn sanitary pads. Each names a specific site where the private and the institutional collide, usually at the private's expense.

"Sick of seeing family since they mourn you as if already dead" names a specific cruelty internal to anticipatory grief. The family's love expresses itself as premature mourning, which forecloses the present tense of the still-living person. To be mourned before dying is to be erased by the very attention meant to honor you. The poem holds this without adjudication: the family's grief is genuine, and its effect on its object is devastating, and these two facts are not reconcilable. The stanza's particular compression — the word "sick" carrying both emotional exhaustion and the condition that makes the mourning necessary — refuses to let any participant escape cleanly.

"Mothers inking names in their children's clothing for body identification" arrives without editorial framing, and that restraint is the move. The act belongs to contexts of mass casualty — war, siege, displacement, disaster — but the poem renders it in the domestic register of ordinary maternal labor. The intimacy of inking a child's name into a collar, performed in the same gesture as sewing a button, holds the catastrophic and the routine in a single image. The stanza connects to "distracting the kids from daily bomb sirens added to the besieged mother's duties" later in the sequence: a diptych of maternal management under conditions that the poem's probable readership encounters only at a distance, as news. For the mothers in these stanzas, the extraordinary is the ordinary.

"Trying to talk to your father in that half-hour window before after-work stupor" maps a precise domestic topology. The window is not metaphorical but structural: everything a child needs to say or ask or secure fits into this interval or goes unsaid. "After-work stupor" is deliberately unspecified in its cause — alcohol is available as a reading, but so is exhaustion, depression, the simple attrition of daily labor. Children rarely possess clinical explanations for parental unavailability. They possess only the window and its closing.

"Extending forgiveness less because he deserves it than because you deserve peace" reframes forgiveness entirely. Not moral generosity toward the offender but self-interested liberation from the weight of sustained grievance. The "he" remains unspecified — father, lover, assailant, colleague — and the ambiguity is generative rather than evasive. The stanza refuses the vocabulary of virtue in which forgiveness is performed as a gift to its recipient. It insists on the transaction's self-directed logic, which is simultaneously more honest and more morally complicated: forgiveness as hygiene, not grace. The formulation is one the poem does not sentimentalize. It notes the motive without condemning it.

"Simply raising a few fingers from the steering wheel to the man on the corner" is the sequence's most minimal act of human recognition, and its placement gives it weight. The raised fingers are acknowledgment in its cheapest and most widely distributable form: a signal that the man on the corner exists in the driver's field of attention. The poem frames this not as charity but as recognition — the gift of being seen, delivered at negligible cost. That such minimal acknowledgment registers as notable is itself an observation about the scarcity of ordinary recognition.

The Chinese food deliveryman stanza is the sequence's most sustained comedic set piece, and its comedy is analytical. The deliveryman is "disgusted by the thought / that the pizza deliveryman now at his door, dreck / of the American Dream, is making eyes at his daughter." The hierarchy being enforced — the Chinese deliveryman locating the pizza deliveryman below himself on the aspirational ladder, protecting his daughter from a rival claimant — is simultaneously recognizable as human and precise as social observation. "Dreck / of the American Dream" performs the Dream's internal class system: among those the Dream has not yet lifted, fine distinctions of relative elevation are maintained with great seriousness. The stanza does not mock this. It records it with a clarity that is its own form of respect.

"In love it is not obscene for an imperfect being to expect being taken as perfect" is the sequence's most generous formulation. It does not argue that love is delusional but that its central demand — to be received as whole, without remainder, without the deduction of one's faults — is legitimate even for the irreducibly flawed. "Obscene" is carefully chosen: it forestalls the objection that such expectation is narcissistic or unreasonable. The poem insists that making this demand belongs to love's proper grammar. The stanza does not promise the expectation will be met.

The hobo stanza achieves its effects through a single image of sustained precision. "A hobo squatting out shit in an alley, / his great-white-shark eyes unfazed / by high beams glowing them like road signs." The great-white-shark eyes carry a specific biological claim: the shark registers no fear because its nervous system does not model danger the way mammals do. The hobo's unfazed eyes suggest a comparable condition — not courage but the radical attrition of the threat-response through sufficient exposure to exposure itself. The high beams illuminate the eyes "like road signs": directional markers for other travelers, utilitarian, impersonal. The man has been converted by circumstance into infrastructure. The image does not grieve this. It records it exactly.

"Even more concealed it seems, now that we abandon / the distinction between man and deed, is that abyssal / stratum in which we are one even with our antipodes" is the sequence's most philosophically ambitious stanza. The argument is counterintuitive: the progressive move of separating persons from their acts — judging the deed without condemning the doer — paradoxically conceals a deeper stratum in which even our most extreme opposites share our nature. To collapse the man/deed distinction in the name of compassion is to lose sight of what genuine compassion requires: the recognition that the capacity for the deed inheres in the same human nature one shares with its perpetrator. "Antipodes" — those at the opposite pole, the furthest imaginable from us — is the exact term for what the poem insists we cannot finally separate ourselves from.

"What do we hope to avoid by labeling all suicides 'cases of mental illness'?" opens a question the poem declines to close. The label performs specific social work — it pathologizes the act, removes it from the domain of rational choice or social indictment, protects the community from examining what conditions it may have produced. The question does not argue that suicide is rational or that mental illness is not real. It asks what function the label serves beyond clinical description, and what that function costs in terms of honest reckoning. The poem is not the first to ask this question, but its placement — between the prison guard tearing sanitary pads and the stanza about being stuck up for a cross piece — gives it particular force. The question sits among images of institutional violence and desperate vernacular prayer.

"Being stuck up for your cross piece, / unsure if it will even help to yell out, / 'Yo dad — dad it's me, bro: Mikey!'" is the sequence's most startling tonal shift, and its comedy does not cancel its horror. The scenario is robbery at gunpoint; the hostage's appeal to paternal recognition — "it's me, bro: Mikey!" — deploys the casual register of street address in a moment of absolute extremity. The "bro" is simultaneously the idiom of the neighborhood and a genuine appeal to brotherhood, to the recognition that the robber and the robbed share a world in which fathers exist and names matter. Whether this appeal could work is left entirely open. The poem trusts the image to carry its own ambivalence.

The dying cluster is the sequence's thematic center of gravity, distributed across multiple stanzas that accumulate into a sustained argument. "Let your dying be an occasion to bring out the best in onlookers" proposes dying as moral practice — not merely endured but performed, in the older sense of performed: brought to completion, given form. "Do not go to your death as an amateur: attend to dying for the research" extends this into epistemological territory. Dying is available only once and is therefore among the experiences most demanding of full attention — to go as an amateur is to waste the data. "So much dying, but still no dying-literacy — dying-literary, in fact, dying" is the sequence's great pun and its most devastating compressed argument. The wordplay enacts through sound what it argues through sense: the culture's literacy about dying is itself dying, the capacity to read death as a meaningful human event atrophying even as death-as-spectacle proliferates. "How much others could grow, shake / at least that intergenerational grudge / against life, seeing a dying done well!" completes the cluster: a well-attended death is among the most significant transmissions one generation can offer another.

"Only whenever the parents left / his bedside was the child allowed / the knowledge that he was dying" is the sequence's most quietly devastating entry. The parents' protection — their refusal to let the child know — deprives him of the one thing that would allow integration of his own dying. Knowledge of one's death becomes something received alone, in the gap between parental visits. The poem does not condemn the parents. The cost of their protection is named with precision; the motive for it is not disputed.

"In the grand theater of fake fury over the president's hot-mic boast that he 'grabs 'em / by the pussy,' she recast her soirée flex — worn like Cruella fur over years of milking / envy from starstruck primates — as mascara-tear MeToo (ripe with anal embellishment)" is the sequence's most politically volatile stanza, and it requires careful handling that neither flattens it into simple anti-feminist provocation nor insulates it from legitimate challenge. The target is not the MeToo movement but a specific figure of opportunistic appropriation: the socially elevated woman who converts a genuine political moment into personal brand extension, wearing feminist outrage as she has worn other markers of status — instrumentally, performatively, for the room. "Soirée flex," "starstruck primates," "Cruella fur," "anal embellishment" — the diction is deliberately excessive, calibrated to match the excess it diagnoses. The poem risks complicity with exactly the dismissal of women's political speech that it claims to be targeting within a subset. That risk is real and the poem does not resolve it. What it does is insist that the category of opportunistic appropriation exists, that it is not identical to the genuine movement, and that failing to name it out of protective solidarity is its own form of bad faith.

"Living in the time where humans / are becoming outdated need not mean / living in a time where they have no purpose" offers the sequence's most measured response to technological displacement anxiety. The distinction between obsolescence and purposelessness is genuine: a hammer does not cease to have a use when power tools arrive. The stanza refuses both the catastrophism that treats human redundancy as total and the optimism that denies the redundancy is occurring. It holds the middle position without sentimentality.

"Father's hands sudsing your own at the sink" arrives near the sequence's close as one of its most purely imagistic entries. No narrative, no argument — only the sensory memory of a specific domestic intimacy: the father's hands working soap into the child's at the sink, the intergenerational transmission of the simplest hygiene. The image accumulates against the sequence's other father observations — the half-hour window, the Mikey stanza — to suggest a complex paternal presence: unavailable, dangerous, and capable of this.

"That age when a child in the antebellum South / had to face that some of his best playmates / are just commodities — indeed, his very own" closes the sequence on one of its most morally exacting images. The child's developmental task — integrating the knowledge that those he plays with are property, and that some of that property is his — is rendered without historical distance. "His very own" arrives at the line's end with the full weight of possession's obscenity. The stanza does not editorialize. The horror is in the situation exactly described.

The final image — "king-of-the-mountain on dirt mounds / excavated from a mine, draglines / paused in the air for the holidays" — closes on a tableau of industrial and childhood scale superimposed. Children play king-of-the-mountain on the byproduct of extraction; the draglines are paused, enormous and idle, for a human holiday that the machines observe only by stopping. The image is not symbolic so much as exact: two scales of human activity — the child's game, the industrial operation — sharing the same ground, temporarily stilled by the same calendar. The sequence ends not on resolution but on this suspended image of scale, industry, play, and pause — the draglines in the air, going nowhere, waiting for the holiday to end.

Formally, Part 88 achieves its effects through contrast of scale and register more consistently than its companion installments. The cosmological ("sensing the dinosaur in the parrot eye," "microbial stowaways in space rock") sits against the micro-domestic ("father's hands sudsing your own at the sink," "looking for an undo button — / on the counter, on the floor — / after accidentally breaking the mug"). The undo button stanza is among the sequence's most psychologically exact: the reflex to look for a real-world control-Z, the body acting before the mind can correct it, names a form of grief-cognition that everyone has experienced and almost no one has articulated. Its placement among the dying stanzas gives it additional resonance: dying is the irreversible event for which no undo button exists and the body keeps looking anyway.

What Part 88 accumulates into is a sustained meditation on the management of the irreversible — dying badly, dying alone, dying with others present who will not say so, dying in institutional custody, dying with children who must wait for their parents to leave before they can know. The sequence's argument, distributed across its fragments, is that the culture has generated enormous machinery for the avoidance of this reckoning and very little for its conduct. The dying-literacy pun is the sequence's thesis: we are dying-illiterate, and the illiteracy itself is dying. What remains is the dragline in the air, paused, waiting for the holiday to end.

Meta Description

A mosaic poem installment organized around dying as medium rather than subject — moving through paternal estrangement, anticipatory grief, bodily humiliation, institutional violence, and the specific textures of human recognition, while building a sustained argument that the culture's dying-literacy is itself dying, leaving its citizens to face the irreversible without the tools to conduct it.

Keywords

Made for You and Me, hive Being, mosaic poem, dying-literacy, anticipatory grief, paternal estrangement, aphoristic poetry, body identification, institutional violence, MeToo opportunism, antebellum childhood, dying well, dragline imagery, undo button grief, hospice poetry, forgiveness as hygiene, cosmological aphorism, American mortality culture, 2017 poetry, contemporary American poetry, fragment poetics, irreversibility and grief

If the first 2017 installment established the mosaic's method — aphoristic fragment, juxtaposition without bridge, the full bandwidth of a contemporary intelligence scanning its moment — Part 87 extends that method into deeper register while intensifying two of its defining pressures: the poem's willingness to hold moral horror and wry observation in the same breath without resolving either into the other, and its insistence that no subject, however sacred or taboo, is exempt from the same quality of unflinching attention. The result is a sequence that is simultaneously funnier, more disturbing, more theologically ambitious, and more politically volatile than its predecessor — a larger hive, humming at higher frequency.

The poem opens on a motif that will recur throughout: the phone as instrument of self-evasion. "Phones to run to in fear of our own inner world" frames the device not as communication technology but as escape hatch — the contemporary equivalent of whatever humans have always reached for when interiority becomes unbearable. What distinguishes this formulation from standard screen-time critique is its precision about what is being fled. Not boredom, not loneliness, not distraction from productivity, but the inner world specifically — the self's encounter with itself. The phone, in this reading, is a form of self-administered anesthesia. It is placed immediately before "death-metal shirts from Walmart," which performs a different but related operation: the commodification of transgression, the domestication of symbolic violence into retail. The sequence implies that the phone and the death-metal shirt are serving comparable psychological functions — the one fleeing inwardness through distraction, the other performing darkness while purchasing it at mass-market price. Both are forms of managed encounter with what actually terrifies.

"Heavy-panting CO2 suffocation in a submarine sunken to depths beyond rescue" arrives without context — no narrative frame, no named disaster — and this is precisely its force. The image is visceral and total, a sealed environment in which the atmosphere becomes poison, in which waiting and dying are the same activity. Its placement between the Walmart shirt and the food-scarcity stanza creates a pressure gradient: the sequence moves from petty cultural contradiction to absolute physical extremity to systemic deprivation. The submarine image functions as a kind of depth marker — the poem is capable of sounding this far down, and it does so without announcement or ceremony.

"Public school attention scarcity from food scarcity" is one of the sequence's most compressed policy arguments. In four words before the preposition, it names the problem that school reformers, curriculum debates, and attention-deficit diagnoses have collectively failed to adequately address: that cognitive availability is a function of caloric availability, that children cannot attend to what they have not been fed. The stanza does not editorialize. It states the causal chain and moves on, leaving the reader to sit with the institutional failure the chain implies.

"Addicted to the people you hate, the world you are trying to negate" achieves something the poem manages repeatedly: a formulation that sounds epigrammatic but resists reduction to mere wit. The addiction model applied to hatred and negation captures something psychologically real about how opposition can become constitutive of identity — how the world one is against can become the primary structure of one's existence, so that its disappearance would leave not liberation but vacancy. The fragment is related to the later observation that "all this trendy talk of how mere critical speech / does violence — that allows the genuinely violent / to chalk up the claims of their victims to hysteria." Both engage the dynamics of antagonism: how opposition, correctly deployed, can become its own form of power, and how the language of harm can be co-opted to neutralize the testimony of the actually harmed.

The shopping cart girl stanza is among the sequence's most tender, and its tenderness is doing argumentative work. "The curbed elation on the face of the girl in the nest of a shopping cart, / clearly — just by that look she has of patient wonder — a good girl never / asking for much, as her mom hands her a box of rainbow-swirl ice pops." "Curbed elation" is exact: joy that has already learned to moderate itself, to not exceed the dimensions of what is offered. "Patient wonder" suggests a child who has developed equanimity not through abundance but through its absence — who has learned to find the extraordinary in the ordinary because the extraordinary is not otherwise available. "Never asking for much" is simultaneously admirable and devastating: it describes a child who has internalized scarcity as her proper scope. The "rainbow-swirl ice pops" arrive with the full specific weight of their cheap, cheerful, adequate reality. This is not pathos performed from outside. It is observation performed with care.

The self-talk stanza operates by stark juxtaposition with the external: "we would be horrified hearing someone say to another, / 'You're just too fucking fat for anyone to like you' — / yet we think nothing of it when we say it to ourselves." The horror, structurally, is that the internal register is not merely permitted but normalized, even encouraged in the language of self-improvement and honest self-assessment. The stanza implicates the wellness culture that appears elsewhere in the larger project: the same health-minded apparatus that restricts screens and theorizes fat praise generates, in its shadow, a vicious internal jurisprudence that would be immediately recognizable as abuse if externalized. The poem does not moralize the point. It simply performs the comparison.

The hospice stanza — "how is the mother ever to insist that the child, / cradled in a lap of her hospiced father for perhaps / the last time before cremation, go off to bed?" — achieves its force through the collision of the routine and the terminal. Bedtime is among the most ordinary of parental imperatives; its enforcement requires the willful interruption of a moment of irreplaceable tenderness. The question is genuinely unanswerable. The poem does not answer it. It holds the impossibility open without resolution, which is the only honest response available to it.

"Love, yes, creates death but death creates so much love — all-you-can-eat crab buffet" is the sequence's most tonally audacious move. The dialectical observation — that love generates mortal vulnerability, that death generates an intensity and generosity of feeling otherwise unavailable — is philosophically serious. The "all-you-can-eat crab buffet" appended to it refuses to let the observation aestheticize itself. The excess and the vulgarity and the democracy of the buffet — anyone can come, anyone can eat beyond reasonable limit — are brought to bear on the economy of grief-love. The buffet image is not mockery; it is a genuine extension of the claim, an insistence that death's love-generating power is not refined or selective but abundant and indiscriminate, available to all comers. The tonal collision enacts the argument.

The AI stanza — "that which evolves from us with enough / intelligence to mock us with penetration, / righteousness, superior to any human artist" — is among the more prescient in the sequence, written in 2017 when this was still largely speculative. What distinguishes it from standard AI anxiety is the specific verb: "mock." The intelligence that emerges from human data is imagined as satirist, not destroyer or assistant — something that has absorbed human culture fully enough to turn it back on us with greater accuracy and moral clarity than we bring to ourselves. "Righteousness" is the charged term: the AI achieves not merely technical superiority but an ethical vantage point from which human behavior is legible in its full contradiction. Whether this is to be feared or desired the poem does not say. The ambivalence is structural.

The theological stanzas form the sequence's most sustained philosophical argument, distributed across multiple entries. "Technically, the existence of a being worthy of a title / such as 'God' must be up to that being alone — / not something else (other-caused) or nothing (uncaused)" constitutes a compressed ontological argument that sidesteps the traditional Anselmian route. The claim is not that God necessarily exists but that the logical preconditions for the title require a self-caused being — one that cannot be derived from prior causes or from nothing. The "technically" is doing significant work: it acknowledges that this is a logical rather than experiential or revelatory claim, and it distances the speaker from full endorsement while establishing the internal coherence of the position. The dead-gods stanza extends this into comparative theology: "all the gods of once good standing, add them / to those of now good standing that believers reject — / yeah, we have a lot of dead gods on our hands." The argument is familiar from Enlightenment religious critique but the tone — "yeah," the casual accounting — strips it of its usual triumphalist atheism. The gods are dead, but their accumulated number is treated as a matter of wry inventory rather than liberation. The poem is not celebrating secular reason. It is noting what belief has historically produced and what it continues to produce, without declaring a victor.

"Feeling horrible about being bored by the bible — yawning even through passages / where God commands the slaughter of every Canaanite that breathes, including / babies nursing at the tit, for their love of bestiality and incest and child sacrifice" is the sequence's most sustained theological dark comedy. The horror is layered: the speaker feels guilt for boredom, when the appropriate response to the content might be moral outrage rather than boredom, and the content that provokes the boredom is itself among the most morally troubling in the canon. The stanza does not argue that the Bible is wrong, or that God does not exist, or that believers are foolish. It dramatizes the gap between the text's assumed sacred status and the phenomenological reality of reading it — a gap in which moral horror and aesthetic tedium collapse into each other.

"Imagine the potential horrors if people / really did believe in a paradise after death, / loving death as the rest of us love life" closes the sequence on its most chilling speculative note. The stanza does not argue that afterlife belief is false. It argues that the full logical consequence of sincere belief in paradise — genuinely loving death as the rest of us love life — would produce horrors that existing religious culture, in its partial and socially moderated forms of belief, manages to avoid. The horror is not in the belief itself but in its full actualization: a world in which death is the goal, not the threat. This connects directly to the earlier fatwa stanza — "fatwas against suicide bombings conveniently unreported" — and together they form the sequence's most sustained engagement with religious violence, approached not through outrage but through the cold logic of what sincere belief, fully acted upon, would actually require.

The sequence's formal range — from two-line observations to six-line narrative fragments, from single nouns ("bum tans," "sexually transmitted fleas") to sustained conditional arguments — refuses any single modality. The ultra-compressed entries are not merely aphorisms but pressure-points: "homes with only two spoons," "sincere as pig shrieks," "chest freezers in mudrooms" — images that carry entire social and economic worlds in a phrase. The single-noun and two-word entries operate differently from the extended tercets: they are the poem breathing in sharply before the longer exhalations. The rhythm of the sequence enacts the associative movement of consciousness through a day, a news cycle, a lifetime of accumulated observation — never settling into any register long enough to become that register's prisoner.

Part 87 of "Made for You and Me" is the hive at full roar: funnier than its predecessor, more dangerous, more theologically engaged, more willing to hold tenderness and grotesquerie in the same breath. It extends the project's fundamental wager — that an intelligence willing to look at everything without deciding in advance what deserves seriousness will produce, in the aggregate, a more honest account of its moment than any curated lyric or organized argument can. The hive does not editorialize. It hums at every frequency simultaneously and trusts the reader to hear what they are capable of hearing.

Meta Description

The second installment of the 2017 portion of "Made for You and Me" extends the mosaic poem's aphoristic method into deeper theological, political, and psychological territory — moving from AI prophecy and dead-gods inventory to shopping-cart tenderness and biblical dark comedy, holding the full range of contemporary consciousness without deciding in advance which of its contents deserves the most serious attention.

Keywords

Made for You and Me, hive Being, mosaic poem, aphoristic poetry, theological satire, dead gods, AI and mockery, food scarcity attention, self-talk and abuse, hospice poetry, afterlife horror, religious violence logic, fat shame, suicide bombing fatwas, shopping cart poverty, all-you-can-eat buffet grief, contemporary American poetry, 2017 poetry, cultural fragment poetry, phone and interiority, death-metal Walmart, CO2 submarine, biblical dark comedy, Canaanite slaughter poetry