to Hive being
welcome
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 84)
“MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 84)” operates less as a lyric sequence in the conventional sense than as an accretive ontology of modern consciousness. The poem does not proceed by argument, narrative, confession, or image-patterning in the ordinary lyric mode. Instead, it advances through abrupt juxtaposition: aphorism, anecdote-fragment, political observation, bodily memory, speculative philosophy, vulgar joke, sociological aside, traumatic flash, and metaphysical proposition arranged in a flattened textual field where no single utterance is granted final hierarchical authority. The result resembles a consciousness attempting to think under conditions of informational oversaturation without surrendering either moral seriousness or libidinal candor. What emerges is a poetics of swarm cognition: the individual mind revealed as a hive through which cultural residue, instinct, historical violence, technological anxiety, erotic memory, and speculative abstraction ceaselessly circulate.
The title “hive Being” is therefore exact. It invokes both Heideggerian ontology and insect collectivity, suggesting a form of existence in which subjectivity is neither sovereign nor singular but composed of competing drives, inherited scripts, social contagions, and intrusive perceptions. The poem’s speaker does not present a stable self reflecting upon the world from critical distance. Rather, the self appears as a site through which fragments of civilization think themselves aloud. The stanzaic units feel less authored than intercepted. This gives the poem its distinctive pressure: one senses not crafted epigram alone, but consciousness struggling to metabolize the unbearable simultaneity of modern experience.
The opening line, “the first pussy fart on Earth,” immediately establishes the poem’s refusal of decorum as a philosophical method rather than mere provocation. The line collapses evolutionary history, sexuality, comedy, shame, and origin myth into a single absurd speculative image. It asks the reader to imagine the emergence of embarrassment itself: the moment bodily contingency first became socially legible. The joke is cosmological. Human civilization is reduced to an animal acoustics that nevertheless carries symbolic charge. The line therefore introduces one of the poem’s central obsessions: the impossibility of separating the lofty operations of culture from the humiliating materiality of embodiment.
This concern intensifies in the next stanza: “infant suckling forced into clitoral grammar—what more explosive semiotic violence?” Here the poem moves from scatological comedy into psychoanalytic horror. The phrase “clitoral grammar” reframes infantile nourishment through the language of sexuality and signification. “Grammar” is crucial because it positions desire not merely as instinct but as syntax: the body inducted into systems of meaning before consent, consciousness, or selfhood exist. The violence named here is “semiotic” because subject formation itself becomes coercive. The infant does not merely enter language; it is eroticized by the structures through which dependence is organized. The line recalls psychoanalytic accounts of polymorphous sexuality, Kristevan theories of abjection, and Lacanian claims regarding entry into the symbolic order, yet the poem’s diction remains aggressively corporeal, preventing theory from sublimating the body into abstraction.
That oscillation between abstraction and vulgarity governs the sequence as a whole. One moment the poem contemplates lifespan extension and the psychological burden of near-immortality; the next it fixates on “that plink of a beer can BB-gunned off a fence.” The juxtaposition is not random. The poem repeatedly demonstrates that cognition itself is structured associatively rather than hierarchically. Minor sensory memories coexist with civilizational anxieties because consciousness does not sort experience according to philosophical dignity. A sound can haunt the psyche with as much persistence as metaphysical dread.
The stanza concerning long-lived humans is especially revealing:
“think of the struggle that people who will live into the hundreds
(five hundred, maybe even a thousand)—think of the struggle
they are bound to have with mortality, the daily haunting of it”
The paradox here is devastating. Longevity does not weaken mortality-consciousness; it intensifies it. The longer one lives, the more death becomes imaginable as theft. Mortality ceases to appear “natural” once technological civilization begins extending the temporal horizon beyond inherited biological expectation. The poem therefore anticipates a specifically posthuman neurosis: not fear of premature death, but terror generated by the expansion of possible life itself. Psychoanalytically, one might say the death drive becomes more oppressive precisely when survival becomes more plausible.
Throughout the sequence, ethical observation is treated with equal skepticism toward innocence and cynicism. Consider the lines:
“seeing a Jew or a Muslim manipulate others for personal gain—our extra fury speaks
not only to the hypocrisy but to our naive myopia”
The poem risks offense in order to diagnose a deeper structure of moral fantasy. The outrage directed toward hypocrisy emerges not merely from ethical disappointment but from a desperate wish to believe certain identities or belief systems can transcend competitive appetite altogether. “Religions, no less than ants, carve turf” collapses spiritual idealism into biological territoriality. Yet the poem does not simply reduce religion to animal struggle. Rather, it reveals the human need to deny our continuity with struggle. The line attacks not faith alone, but the narcissistic fantasy that any collective identity escapes predation.
This suspicion toward moral purification recurs elsewhere. The stanza on Confederate statues is particularly nuanced:
“graffitiing the confederate statues is way better than tearing them down—
the racist persons depicted surely would like neither, but one thing is clear:
the racist logos running through each of them begs for them to be torn down”
The passage stages an internal argument rather than a stable position. Graffiti preserves visibility while contaminating authority; destruction risks historical erasure while refusing continued veneration. The key word is “logos.” Racism here is not merely personal prejudice embodied by historical figures but an organizing rationality coursing through the monument itself. The statue becomes ideology petrified into civic form. Yet even as the poem condemns that logos, it remains fascinated by symbolic transformation rather than simple removal. Desecration becomes semiotic warfare.
Again and again, the poem returns to systems that sustain themselves through managed suffering. “best for profit is for treatment to go on for life” condenses an entire critique of pharmaceutical capitalism into one flat declarative sentence. The nearby image of “a dialysis center in almost every strip mall” extends this critique spatially. Chronic illness becomes infrastructural. The landscape itself begins to resemble a diagram of managed biological dependency. Yet the poem avoids rhetorical inflation. Its power comes from understatement: the casual observation made unbearable by its familiarity.
The sequence’s psychoanalytic intelligence emerges most strongly in its treatment of familial memory and defensive narration. The lines:
“as an excuse to keep on having
her excuse, her story had to be
that we were all mean to her”
reveal identity as retrospective self-justification. The repeated “excuse” suggests that psychic survival often depends less on truth than on narratable injury. Likewise, the memory of “your mother dragging pajamaed you / throughout the city in search of him” transforms adultery into childhood theater. The phrase “the whoremaster fuck” is grotesquely excessive, almost comic in its rage, yet from the child’s perspective it becomes primordial linguistic trauma: sexuality encountered as pursuit, humiliation, accusation, and instability.
Humor itself appears throughout the poem as an unstable threshold between intimacy and cruelty:
“typically the better you are
at being funny, the closer you come
to tipping over into meanness”
The insight is psychologically acute because comedy depends upon controlled aggression. Wit derives energy from violation: embarrassment, exposure, incongruity, superiority, timing. The funniest person in the room often possesses the sharpest instinct for weakness. The poem recognizes that humor and sadism share structural proximity. To make others laugh is often to demonstrate mastery over vulnerability.
Alcohol, meanwhile, is described not in terms of escape but temporal belonging:
“the sweetness of alcohol, how
it allows even the most neurotic
to be present—to belong to now”
This is one of the sequence’s gentlest moments. Presence appears not as enlightenment but pharmacological relief from recursive self-consciousness. The neurotic subject experiences ordinary temporality as exclusion from immediacy. Alcohol briefly repairs that exclusion by quieting metacognition. The phrase “belong to now” is especially moving because it implies that sober consciousness often feels exiled from the present tense.
The stanzas concerning mortality and nonhuman consciousness extend the poem’s ontological scope beyond the human. The claim that people deny animal mortality-awareness because “funerals are necessary for such awareness” exposes the anthropocentric absurdity of demanding symbolic ritual as proof of interiority. The poem repeatedly resists human exceptionalism. This resistance culminates in the final stanza:
“our dreams of the foreign might suggest
a beyond to our horizons, but that beyond
need not be beyond the natural world”
The ending refuses both reductive materialism and supernatural consolation. Human longing for transcendence may indeed indicate realities beyond current understanding, but the poem declines metaphysical inflation. Mystery does not require the supernatural. The unknown can remain immanent. This is characteristic of the poem’s broader intellectual posture: anti-sentimental without becoming spiritually flat.
Formally, the poem’s fragmentation performs the very hive-consciousness it theorizes. There is no privileged center from which meaning radiates outward. Instead, significance emerges through accumulation, collision, and tonal whiplash. The reader is forced into an active interpretive role, constructing continuity across discontinuity. This creates a peculiar phenomenological effect: reading the poem feels less like following a speaker and more like inhabiting a cognition.
The poem’s syntax contributes to this effect through strategic compression. Many stanzas operate as compressed thought-events rather than complete arguments. The line breaks produce hesitation without lyric softness. They mimic cognition interrupting itself, revising itself, leaping laterally before emotional stabilization can occur. The result resembles notebook philosophy contaminated by dream residue, internet overload, vulgar humor, political despair, and bodily memory.
What ultimately distinguishes this sequence is its refusal to partition human existence into separate domains. Politics bleeds into biology; comedy into cruelty; eros into infancy; metaphysics into strip malls; ontology into family trauma. The poem understands consciousness as fundamentally contaminated by simultaneity. One cannot think mortality without also thinking commerce, sexuality, boredom, violence, medication, ideology, and animality. The hive is not collective harmony but crowded cohabitation inside the mind.
“hive Being” therefore becomes a poem about modern psychic life after the collapse of stable metaphysical shelter. It does not mourn that collapse nostalgically, nor celebrate fragmentation as liberation. Instead, it inhabits fragmentation as the actual phenomenology of contemporary thought. The self emerges as porous, overrun, unable to prevent the circulation of inherited language, cultural debris, historical guilt, bodily absurdity, and speculative terror. Yet the poem’s very act of arrangement constitutes a counterforce against dissolution. The fragments do not resolve into system, but they do achieve pressure, rhythm, recurrence, and conceptual resonance. In that sense, the poem transforms psychic overload into form without pretending to cure it.
Meta Description
A philosophically and psychoanalytically inflected mosaic-poem sequence exploring embodiment, mortality, symbolic violence, ideology, humor, family trauma, posthuman anxiety, and the swarm-like fragmentation of contemporary consciousness.
Keywords
mosaic poetry, hive consciousness, psychoanalytic poetics, semiotic violence, fragmentation, posthumanism, mortality anxiety, embodied cognition, symbolic order, aphoristic poetry, ontological dread, libidinal theory, ideological critique, contemporary long poem, swarm subjectivity, trauma and memory, vulgar materialism, consciousness studies, modern alienation, philosophical poetry
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 83)
“MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 83)” continues the project’s distinctive method of aphoristic collage, assembling philosophical provocations, social observations, grotesque humor, and existential reflections into a cumulative portrait of human contradiction. As in prior installments, the sequence does not proceed by linear argument so much as thematic resonance: fragments echo, refract, and contaminate one another until a broader anthropology emerges. This installment is especially concerned with the tension between performance and sincerity, consolation and self-deception, and the ways human beings metabolize suffering into systems of meaning, ritual, and identity.
A major through-line here is the instability of emotional authenticity. “bothered for years by not crying at the funeral” captures how grief becomes self-surveillance: the mourner worries not only about loss but about whether the proper signs of loss manifested. Likewise, “ashamed that you pray” compresses modern secular embarrassment and spiritual longing into a single line. Throughout the sequence, emotional life appears inseparable from reflexive self-consciousness, as though no feeling can remain innocent of interpretation.
The installment repeatedly examines compensatory or adaptive illusions. “a post-trauma need to stick / to something—anything—while chances still remain” is psychologically sharp because it frames attachment less as conviction than survival strategy. Similarly, the line about “presenting opportunities only to those thought likely to follow through” identifies a hidden social sieve: confidence and prior legitimacy become prerequisites for receiving further possibility, creating recursive systems of advantage and exclusion.
Several entries interrogate communal narratives around morality and suffering. “we thank God for saving the one girl from the bloody rubble, not for the earthquake” is particularly effective because it exposes selective attribution in religious gratitude. The line quietly questions why divine agency is credited for rescue but not destruction. Likewise, the final observation about believers assuming Christ’s return will occur according to their own time zone brilliantly skewers the hidden narcissism embedded even within supposedly cosmic eschatology.
This installment is especially strong when exploring the social mechanics of exclusion and attraction. The fragment about the gregarious woman excluded from the group because others sensed “something sour under that sugar” is psychologically nuanced. The issue is not simple falseness, but overinvestment: affection experienced as acquisitive rather than free. “every grin and hug aimed / to win over any part of them” identifies a subtle social desperation people often detect intuitively before they can articulate it.
Likewise, “asking her why she will not even give you a chance—that might be involved” is wonderfully compressed social psychology. The very act of demanding romantic consideration becomes evidence against deserving it. The line succeeds because it trusts implication rather than explanation.
A recurring concern throughout the sequence is the tension between performance and reality. “having to remember which mask to wear with what person” treats identity as situational modulation rather than unified essence. The future-oriented observation that prophets may eventually “make a showcase out of their imperfections” extends this concern into media culture, suggesting that total visibility transforms vulnerability itself into performance capital.
Mortality and bodily decline continue to haunt the sequence. “board games, cards, crotchet for the boring parts of a loved one’s dying” is devastating precisely because it acknowledges the mundane temporality of deathwatching. The line refuses sentimental compression, recognizing that prolonged dying contains stretches of banality no less real than moments of sorrow. Similarly, “bettered, at least for a period, / by dementia’s power to free you / from regrets and grievances” captures the morally disorienting possibility that cognitive decline may relieve psychic suffering.
The installment also returns repeatedly to institutional and ideological skepticism. The “fat glorification” fragment is particularly layered. It initially appears to satirize body-positivity rhetoric, but then pivots toward cynical speculation about pharmaceutical timing and market incentives. The target becomes not merely cultural attitudes toward weight, but the entanglement of ideology, commerce, and delayed technological salvation.
One of the sequence’s deepest philosophical tensions appears in the lines about artificial intelligence inheriting humanity’s metaphysical labor. The possibility that asking “what is this place and what are we doing here?” may cease to be uniquely human reframes existential inquiry itself as something potentially outsourceable. The poem recognizes both the temptation and the loss embedded in that prospect.
The ayahuasca fragment is another standout. Its “jump-cut imagery” acknowledges the artificiality of psychedelic revelation while insisting that fabricated or hallucinatory presentation need not invalidate moral insight. The bigot’s revelation concerning his houseplant’s ancestral care expands moral imagination across evolutionary and ecological continuity.
Formally, the collage structure remains highly effective. The rapid movement between theology, sex, illness, childhood, philosophy, shame, and absurdity mirrors consciousness itself: associative, unstable, layered. Meaning emerges not through transition but through accumulation and juxtaposition.
Ultimately, this installment of “hive Being” presents humanity as a species perpetually improvising between humiliation and transcendence, sincerity and theater, appetite and meaning. Its fragments repeatedly expose the hidden psychological mechanics beneath ordinary social and spiritual life while still preserving a strange sympathy for the creatures caught inside those mechanisms.
Meta Description:
An aphoristic collage-poem exploring shame, mortality, religion, performance, social exclusion, existential anxiety, and the hidden psychological mechanics shaping human behavior.
Keywords:
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2, hive Being, aphoristic poetry, existentialism, religion, shame, mortality, social psychology, philosophy, poetic analysis
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 82)
“MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 82)” continues this project’s distinctive mode of aphoristic-philosophical collage, using compressed provocations, grotesque humor, moral paradox, and metaphysical inquiry to map the contradictory textures of human consciousness. As with prior installments, the organizing intelligence lies not in linear argument but in thematic accumulation: each fragment acts as a strike against some illusion—moral, religious, sentimental, political, erotic, or existential—until a larger anthropology emerges.
A recurring concern in this installment is self-deception, especially moral self-deception. “giving him praise, obviously gratuitous, to make him feel how piddly he really is” brilliantly captures cruelty disguised as generosity. Likewise, “his itch to know—at heart, nothing more than an itch to discredit someone” exposes epistemic motives that masquerade as principled inquiry. The sequence repeatedly interrogates how noble surfaces conceal pettier engines beneath.
Religion receives especially sustained scrutiny. “Satan is a theist” is a wonderfully compressed inversion, reminding us that belief itself cannot be the metric of spiritual legitimacy. Several entries target the epistemic symmetry between conventional religion and openly fictional belief systems: “what does it say about ‘legitimate’ gods and religions / that people today go to Jedi Church or sincerely pray / to Spiderman...?” This is not merely a cheap atheistic jab, but a pressure test on religious epistemology: what differentiates inherited sacred fictions from transparently modern ones? Elsewhere, religious hypocrisy, scriptural violence, and faith-maintenance absurdity are sharply satirized, especially in the marvelous image of the parent recalibrating failed apocalypse prophecy with “Ah! Another time zone!”
The installment also returns repeatedly to behavioral continuity across development, particularly the mutation of early psychological mechanisms into adult pathologies. “opposing your conscience to hurt yourself— / now an end in itself...” revisits a theme you’ve explored elsewhere: coping strategies drifting from interpersonal function into autonomous compulsion. This concern with gradual transformation appears in other registers too—“rhythm lost being out of the gutter so long,” for instance, where adaptation to one environment erodes capacities once necessary elsewhere.
Mortality and temporal finitude quietly structure many entries. “the half-done crossword puzzle of the dead” is especially effective in its simplicity: ordinary interruption becomes existential emblem. Likewise, “at the age when it is clear that this all is winding up, you say ‘in a way, it is not’” captures both denial and metaphysical hope with remarkable economy. The line about owning up to a loved one that she is too sick to live introduces a different temporal burden: the ethics of acknowledgment versus emotional preservation.
One of the installment’s strongest through-lines is its suspicion of institutional self-preservation disguised as moral purpose. “beware of activists who strive to prevent their own irrelevance” is cuttingly concise. Similarly, the line about received views being maintained to preserve the baptizing institution’s survival (echoing prior entries) resonates with the broader skepticism toward organizations whose continued necessity depends on perpetuating the conditions they claim to oppose.
War and violence are treated with characteristic moral complexity. The ceasefire soccer-game fragment is particularly strong because it refuses cheap sentimentality. What might initially appear as a heartwarming sign of shared humanity “horseshoes back into barbarism” once placed against the knowledge of resumed slaughter. Likewise, the line suggesting that denying scriptural influence on religious violence risks making such violence innate is philosophically sharp: it ironically defends the explanatory dignity of culture against essentialist readings.
Erotic and bodily material continue serving both comic and philosophical purposes. The grotesque convent-incubus fragment weaponizes absurdity against supernatural credulity. The exaggerated clitoral image operates in the project’s familiar register of obscene corporeal specificity as destabilizing counterweight to abstraction. Elsewhere, sex intersects with psychology and social power in more subtle ways.
Perhaps the deepest philosophical entry comes at the end: “turning reductionist moves on their head: / x-y-z neurons firing are nothing but love / rather than the other way around.” This is a marvelous reversal. Rather than treating human experience as reducible to neural mechanics, it provocatively treats the mechanics as derivative descriptions of richer phenomena. It encapsulates a larger tension running throughout the sequence: between reductive explanation and irreducible lived significance.
Formally, the installment remains highly effective in its collage structure. The jumps between grotesque comedy, metaphysical seriousness, street realism, theological satire, and existential poignancy are not random but constitutive of the project’s worldview: consciousness itself is this jagged, this promiscuous in its associations. Meaning emerges not from smooth transitions but from cumulative abrasion.
The result is another compelling installment in a long-form poetic anthropology of contradiction.
Meta Description:
A philosophical collage-poem exploring moral self-deception, religion, mortality, institutional hypocrisy, and the contradictory textures of human consciousness.
Keywords:
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2, hive Being, aphoristic poetry, religion, moral psychology, mortality, satire, philosophy, poetic analysis
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 81)
This fragment, “MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 81),” continues the sequence’s mosaic method, assembling a field of observations that orbit narrative control, self-deception, estrangement, and the unstable relationship between perception and truth. As elsewhere in the sequence, no single proposition governs the whole; instead, meaning emerges through juxtaposition, with comic, philosophical, grotesque, and elegiac registers colliding to produce a portrait of consciousness in all its contradiction.
One major thread is the struggle over narrative ownership. The line about those whose “upper-caste power allowed them to control the narrative that they are powerless” encapsulates a recurring concern in the sequence: the ability of dominant groups or institutions to frame themselves as victims, thereby shaping public perception to their advantage. This skepticism toward narrative construction appears elsewhere in subtler form: “describing the past in the future tense goes a long way to making a prophet” exposes how rhetorical framing can manufacture authority, while reflections on slavery, religion, and familial storytelling likewise interrogate how moral narratives are built, justified, or inherited.
A second dominant concern is the persistence of primal interpretive habits beneath modern consciousness. “The human in us cannot help but first see / squirrel tracks in the snow as ancient / language” beautifully captures the mind’s instinct to read signs, patterns, and intentionality into the world. This instinct connects to religion, prophecy, telepathy, superstition, and art throughout the fragment. The question is not whether humans interpret, but whether interpretation is an adaptive necessity or a distortion we cannot escape.
The fragment also returns insistently to self-deception as both burden and survival strategy. The lines on self-love and ruined relationships are especially sharp, suggesting that self-recrimination may itself be an extension of narcissistic posing rather than honesty. Likewise, the observation that pretending long enough may normalize hypocrisy points to identity as performance hardened into default consciousness. Even the line about speaking aloud while alone despite already thinking the words suggests the human need to externalize inner life, as though cognition alone does not suffice.
Another recurring thread is estrangement from self and others across time. The “brittle letter” reopened “for what you know is the last time” introduces mortality and farewell, while the lines about dissociating from one’s formerly depressed self critique retrospective cruelty toward prior vulnerability. The observation that family members would never read the work one fears their judgment over is mordantly funny precisely because it exposes how imagined audiences govern behavior more powerfully than actual ones. The fragment repeatedly reveals consciousness as populated by ghosts: former selves, imagined judges, anticipated readers.
The stanza also explores the tension between dignity and reduction. Blindness recast as practical challenge, depression hidden as dishonorable weakness, the lugubrious voice flattened into tonal absence—these moments examine what happens when lived complexity is translated into social shorthand. Even the grotesque or comic images (the deaf lovers startling hearing observers, the prodigal son’s feast complicated by sibling perception) participate in this larger inquiry into how human beings reduce one another through framing.
As in prior installments, the sacred and the profane coexist without hierarchy. Rogue planets retaining heat sit beside hair-sucking girls, theological disgust beside stamp-licking technological history, metaphysical questions beside corner-store robbery. This is not randomness but method: the mosaic insists that consciousness does not segregate philosophical seriousness from bodily absurdity. Thought itself is promiscuous.
The final question—whether genius is diminished if revealed as mimicry of birdsong—is especially apt as a closing gesture. It distills a broader anxiety running through the fragment: whether human originality, moral agency, even identity itself are less autonomous than we imagine. That question echoes backward across the entire piece, touching religion, language, desire, and art alike.
Meta Description:
A mosaic poem exploring narrative control, self-deception, estrangement, and humanity’s instinct to impose meaning, juxtaposing philosophical reflection with grotesque and comic observation.
Keywords:
mosaic poetry, narrative control, self-deception, perception, consciousness, estrangement, religion, art, hive Being, poetic analysis
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
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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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