to Hive being
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What is Hive Being, and Why the Name?
You have likely heard talk of a hive mind, where one global mind finds more or less figurative expression in various local minds. Such talk is common enough in nature documentaries, especially ones concerning ants or bees, and in sci-fi programs. Take that notion, at least a loose version of it, and broaden its scope. That will be a decent first step in understanding the title I have chosen both for my Blog and for the first five-volume installment of my magnum opus Made For You and Me, a fragmentary collection of minimalist stanzas from 2016 to 2020.
In alignment with Spinoza (the 17th Century Rationalist to whom I devoted my doctoral studies), I view reality in its totality as a grand hive Being: all entities are but pulsating manifestations of the buckstopping fount of everything, an ultimate being we might call “God” or “Nature” (so long as, out of respect for the capital “G” and the capital “N,” we limit it neither to some anthropomorphic cloud father hurling lightning bolts nor to mere wilderness untouched by human smog). According to the hive-Being view (where reality is one lone superorganism, a monistic—and we might even say unividualist—conception I defend in both my creative and academic capacities), each non-foundational being (each being, that is, whose essence does not involve existence) is an utterly necessitated expression or eruption or exudation of this eternal source—each is, perhaps better put, a mode or manner of being, and so a focal point through which is disclosed, what classical theists sometimes call “being itself” (ipsum esse subsistens): the realness of the real, the being of whatever may be, the sheer activity of being, the very isness of whatever is. This Blog, which duplicates my Substack, throbs as but one among many literary unfurlings of this self-necessitated foundation, this supreme wellspring, of which we—like black holes and broken beliefs, like fractal ferns and flickering flames—are the inevitable stylings.
My Journey
I am an academic who found himself pressured into early retirement by the rising tides of cancel culture. The illiberal scourge of censoring, silencing, and shaming—although always with us throughout our evolution—reached a local peak around 2021. That was the turbulent year my creative pursuits, which the old left once encouraged as a healthy outlet for the stresses of a childhood steeped in poverty and illiteracy, drew the ire of the new safe-space left. A small cadre of self-proclaimed victims and their allies, several of whom continue to berate me years later under pseudonyms as see through as their sexual infatuation, sought to erase me and my heterodoxy. They found support from a wannabe-woke dean, covered in the grand inquisitor robes of our decadent modernity (full-body tattoos) and just itching to signal his commitment to protecting “vulnerable populations” from triggering material (even if just, as it was in my case, off-duty poems “unbecoming for someone calling himself a teacher”). Although I eventually won my due-process case with the help of The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, I slunk away from a college that turned its back on protecting freedom of expression and from an institution increasingly intolerant of intellectual diversity.
The wrecking ball to my too-comfy office in the windowless ivory tower came with a silver lining. From the ashes of my professional aspirations rose a phoenix of increased freedom to fulfill the literary calling I have pursued for decades. Reputation concerns never stopped me, even within academia’s sterile halls of conformity. Indeed, my unapologetic defiance, which has long baffled friends and family, no doubt chummed even safe waters—almost as if I were asking for it all along—until the cancel shiver grew too frenzied to hold back its blind thrashings. But now, now I piston the most forbidden territories of human thought with no longer even a twinge of conscience. The newfound freedom means extra time to hone my craft. When not assisting special-needs communities (a day job far more rewarding than freeway-flyer drudgeries), I pursue my literary mission with Dionysian fervor.
Call for Co-Conspirators
This space, my digital sanctuary, showcases the fruits of my mission. Think of my posts, even those linking to my publications, as works in progress. I want your input, unflinching brutality included. Each post begins with an invitation to action: “Let’s workshop this [draft about x, y, z].” Your contributions, whether through public comments or my contact page, help hammer scraps of ore into polished blades fit for magazine publication.
Your input is valuable, even if you are neither a writer nor a reader of literature—twin disciplines dying by the cyber nanosecond. Sometimes—even if at the risk of uttering banalities—an outsider’s fresh vantage can pierce the veils of convention to reveal what insiders miss. It often takes an outsider to make us even think to question our ingrained presuppositions and attitudes. I stand by the hygienic value of contagion. That is one reason I advocate so strongly for intellectual diversity and freedom of expression. And that is also one reason I was so harrowed by the anti-diversity swell of cancel culture in academia (an institution that should be the utmost caretaker of such values)—harrowed especially insofar as that swell masqueraded under the gaslighting guise of “diversity”).
You will witness the breathing evolution of my writings over time. To track these changes, I label each revision by round: “ROUND 2,” ROUND 3,” and so forth. Each piece undergoes continuous refinement based on your feedback and my own revisitations. Sometimes changes will mar the work. That is the risk of creative tinkering as a finite creature. I hope you will alert me to missteps. After many semesters of university writing workshops, one rule has impressed itself upon me: when someone senses a flaw, something almost always needs to change—even if, yes, the proposed solution misses the mark (which often it does). From a quick look into the archives, accessible here, you can see how much I have benefited from your feedback so far.
My Hope
Sharing drafts can be daunting. But showing you the ravaged and unperfumed real deal unfiltered by makeup (stuttering starts and falsities, awkward line breaks and clumsy word choices, grammatical errors and misspellings)—that not only makes my work more relatable, but helps me refine things through your input. I hope the unfiltered look at the raw process of fumbling, rather than just the polished product, also helps other writers develop their craft. Imperfect works often instruct more than perfect ones: whereas the perfect ones tend to have a grace by which they slip inside us without activating our scrutiny, the imperfect ones—especially the near perfect ones—show us glaringly what not to do.
People laugh at me, seeing—in my tilting at the windmills of literary excellence—a Don Quixote clunking around in Arthurian armor in a post-knight era. I am not naïve. I am well aware of the diminishing ability to read, let alone well: slowly and deeply, with gratitude. I am also aware that my style, which often nests subpoints within larger points, never waters down virtuosity for the sake of mass appeal. I watch readers stumble over my sentences, unable to unlock even just the music of the envelope let alone the semantic meat within, which—given my tendency to flashlight through the darker facets of human nature (the addicts, the miscreants, the abusers among us)—only adds an additional alienating layer of difficulty). Beholding these depressive scenes of even supportive family members getting bucked off my syntactic bronco makes me feel like a dinosaur who should get a hint and, if not succumb to the brain rot of skibidi-toilet speak, just hang himself already. Even though the decline in linguistic background and grammatical voltage makes my compositions seem quixotic in a world binging Netflix and TikTok, I persist—raging against the dying of the light—by some internal compulsion to celebrate the richness of language and thought.
My hope is that, despite social media’s unparalleled power to farm our attention, people never forget the unique power of writing. Beyond unveiling hypocrisy, teasing out complex implications, and detailing the commonalities between even the most alien phenomena, writing offers something we need today—trapped in agoraphobic cyber bubbles only thickened by the Lyme dangers of forests and the COVID dangers of cities—perhaps more than ever. Granting us rich access to the first-person perspectives of others (to how things feel to them), writing serves as one of humanity’s best tools for combating loneliness. It allows us to linger, broadly and deeply and at high resolution, within the inner lives of others in a way that other arts can only suggest.
What to Expect
My work spans a broad spectrum: from metaphysical discourses on free will and determinism and the ontology of holes to the ephemera of western culture (whether the childhood impacts of the hypersexual mono-image of black woman as squirting twerkers or Terrence Howard’s sham revolution of mathematics). Some tight and minimal, others free-flowing sprawls; some heady and abstract, others emotional and imagistic—my inkwell musings, which often blend scholarly rigor with a dark humor from both high and low culture, aim to capture the visceral intensity of our personal and social and ultimately existential predicaments.
By no means can I deny that drug abuse, sexual assault, and the tales of the broken and the damned loom large in the tag cloud of my work. My writing will never be a paradise of easy truths and comforting lies. It will challenge you, provoke you, and at times even repulse you. I offer no apologies for the monsters I unleash. They are as much a part of us, at long root scared rodent mammals scurrying in the shadows of dinosaurs, as our noblest aspirations.
But make no mistake. It is not all downer darkness. The archives are my receipts. You will find pieces exploring the pursuit of authenticity in a media-saturated world, the search for meaning in an indifferent cosmos, and the celebration of beauty in both the sublime and the profane. I locate much of my inspiration, in fact, in novelists like Dostoevsky and poets like Ted Kooser—writers unafraid to pursue moral agendas or risk Hallmark sentimentality in an age that often sneers at sincerity.
Be they satirical dissections of modern social dynamics or poignant poems about addiction or academic articles on moral responsibility, my goal is to provoke thought, evoke emotion, and foster meaningful dialogue. Fear has not and will not stop me from challenging humanity’s fundamental taboos (like bestiality and cannibalism) or self-reflecting into the dark chaos of the subconscious, even if that means exposing the Jungian shadows—the inner Goebbels—lurking within us all!
Expect posts each day, no day missed. Donations are welcome, but I impose no paywall: it feels wrong to charge for art, especially given our date with obliteration. Feel free to explore what amounts to, at the time of writing this, close to a thousand pieces of poetry and prose here. That should give you a sense of what awaits.
Join me—specula holstered—on this literary odyssey into the public and private nooks of the hive Being. Let us navigate the labyrinth of creation together, confronting our demons and even slaying our darlings if we must. Let us dance on the razor’s edge between the sublime and the profane in pursuit of an elusive literary perfection never to be confused—as it has been confused in our declining civilization—with the pursuit of popularity or likeability over truth.
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MADE FOR YOU AND ME 3: hive Being (Stanzas 2018--part 1)
The first installment of the 2018 sequence announces a shift in the hive's atmospheric pressure. Where the 2016 and 2017 sequences built their range gradually, moving between registers with something like leisure, Part 1 of 2018 arrives already at maximum compression — its entries shorter on average, more aphoristically concentrated, and more willing to let a single phrase do the work that earlier installments might have distributed across three lines. The sequence feels accelerated, as though the hive has learned that the world it is documenting moves faster than the forms available to document it, and has adjusted accordingly.
The sequence's opening entries establish its governing tensions immediately. "A neck-rubbing boss — your neck" is eight words and a complete power analysis: the intimacy of physical touch deployed as a vehicle for dominance, the possessive "your neck" implicating the reader in the subordination. "Off-the-rack identities" follows, naming the commodification of selfhood with the precision of a fashion metaphor that is also a critique of the identity politics it describes — identities assembled from available stock rather than made to measure, the illusion of individuality within a system of standardized options. These early entries are working faster than their predecessors, trusting the reader to fill in more of the analytical space.
The gender cluster in Part 1 is the most sustained and most contentious in the project so far, and it demands serious engagement rather than either endorsement or dismissal. "The barbarism of gender-reveal parties in an age of choose your own gender" identifies a genuine cultural contradiction: the elaborate celebration of binary gender assignment at birth sits in uneasy tension with a culture that increasingly insists gender is self-determined. The poem does not resolve this tension; it names it. "Born gay, perhaps — but born fagulously falsetto?" is sharper — it distinguishes between the reasonable claim that sexual orientation has biological basis and the more questionable cultural performance of gay identity, suggesting that the latter may be learned rather than innate without thereby dismissing the former. "Then let any AI who identifies as human compete in human chess" applies the identify-as logic to an absurd case, not to mock transgender identity but to examine the philosophical consistency of the underlying principle. The sequence is not anti-trans; it is philosophically rigorous in ways that contemporary discourse has largely foreclosed, and its rigor is the form's commitment, not a political position.
"The uncomfortable alliance between nostalgic regressives and trans revolutionaries / on shared advocacy of gender stereotypes" is the sequence's most analytically precise gender entry. The observation is genuine: certain strands of trans discourse, in insisting that gender identity maps onto the full apparatus of traditional gender presentation — pink for girls, blue for boys; dolls and trucks; particular vocal registers and behavioral norms — reproduce the gender essentialism that feminist theory spent decades critiquing. The alliance with "nostalgic regressives" is uncomfortable precisely because it is structurally real, whatever the intentions of either party. The comparison to the Klan/NOI alliance on racial separation is extreme but not arbitrary — it names the phenomenon of ideologically opposed movements converging on shared positions, which is a real political pattern.
The testosterone entry is the sequence's most medically pointed intervention in the gender debate: "testosterone is such an anxiety slayer that giving / the teen just a pinch will drive away any dubitation / about whether gender dysphoria is her real issue." The argument is that anxiety, depression, and gender dysphoria can present similarly, and that testosterone's anxiolytic effects might resolve the presenting symptoms without resolving — and while foreclosing the resolution of — the underlying question. This is a genuine clinical concern, not a transphobic dismissal, and the sequence's willingness to name it reflects the same commitment to uncomfortable honesty that runs through the project's treatment of race, addiction, and death.
"His trauma turned into a pathology, but his pathology made his vengeance unending" achieves what the best mosaic entries do — it names a psychological mechanism that is immediately recognizable once named, that one has never seen named in quite this way. Trauma pathologized becomes justification for the very behaviors the trauma produced; the pathology, once established, provides infinite warrant for its own continuation. The entry is not about any specific person but about a structure of self-perpetuation that operates across contexts.
The Bateman entry is among the installment's most culturally pointed: "like those who 'miss the point' and celebrate Patrick Bateman, we seem now a culture / that celebrates, apes even, artistic depictions of our depravity." The American Psycho reference names the specific failure of ironic consumption — the reader who takes the satirical portrait of aspiration and sociopathy as aspiration rather than critique. The sequence extends this beyond Bateman to the broader cultural pattern: art made in critique of the worship of "bling and Botox hoes" consumed as endorsement of exactly that worship. The ironic register becomes unavailable once the audience has lost the capacity to register it.
The slavery entry — "negatives of slavery aside, at least blacks got to learn who the real God is" — is the installment's most deliberately provocative and most carefully calibrated irony. Voiced in the register of the apologist, it enacts the rhetorical move it is critiquing: the acknowledgment of atrocity as a prelude to the claim of compensatory benefit. The irony is complete and requires no authorial commentary; the logic exposes itself. That it will be misread by some readers is the point — the sequence trusts that misreading to identify its own audience.
"Mushrooms cutting out the priest between you and God" is the installment's most compressed psychedelic theology, and it is entirely serious beneath its wit. The priest functions as institutional mediator — the church's claim to interpretive authority over divine experience requires that direct encounter be classified as either illegitimate or pathological. Psychedelics are the pharmacological disintermediation of that authority, producing experiences of the kind that the institutional framework claims to facilitate but actually channels through its own structures.
"The moon tends not to speak much to those with glowing screens" achieves the rare thing of being a complaint about technology that is also genuinely beautiful. The moon has always been the figure for the kind of attention that requires darkness and quiet and the willingness to simply be present to what is there. The screen is its negation not because technology is inherently alienating but because the screen's specific operation — the pull of notification, the demand of the feed — forecloses precisely the kind of receptive stillness the moon requires. The entry does not moralize; it observes, and the observation is enough.
"We belong to a 'fixed' constellation in another's night sky" is the installment's most quietly devastating entry. From our own position we are moving through space; from a sufficiently distant vantage, we appear fixed, part of a pattern we cannot ourselves perceive. The application to human life is immediate: the patterns we constitute for others — the fixed points in their sky — are invisible to us from inside our own motion. The entry is about the gap between self-perception and how one appears in another's life, between the experience of change and the appearance of constancy, between the self we know to be in flux and the self others have integrated into their own orientation.
Formally, Part 1 of 2018 is the most compressed installment in the project to date. The average entry is shorter, the transitions more abrupt, the gaps between topics wider. This is not slackening of attention but its intensification — the hive moving faster through its material because the material itself is moving faster, because the cultural moment it is documenting has accelerated beyond the pace of the earlier stanzas. The 2018 sequence has absorbed the 2016 and 2017 sequences' lessons and is now operating at a higher frequency, trusting that the reader who has traveled this far can keep up with the hive at full speed.
Meta Description
The first 2018 installment of the mosaic poem arrives at maximum compression — its entries shorter, its transitions more abrupt, its cultural analysis more concentrated — moving through gender politics, trauma pathology, psychedelic theology, Bateman and ironic consumption, testosterone and dysphoria, and the moon's silence in the age of glowing screens, all at the accelerated frequency of a hive that has learned its own method and is now operating at full speed.
Keywords
Made for You and Me 3, hive Being, 2018 sequence, mosaic poem, gender politics, trans debate, testosterone and dysphoria, Patrick Bateman irony, psychedelic theology, moon and screens, trauma pathology, gender reveal parties, slavery apologist irony, constellation and selfhood, compressed aphorism, contemporary American poetry, fragment poetics, cultural acceleration, identity commodification
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2016--FULL YEAR)
The 2016 installment of "Made for You and Me" — the first chapter of the hive Being project — is both foundation and overture. Where the 2017 sequence arrived already in full command of its method, the 2016 installment is the form discovering itself: more exploratory in its range, more willing to sit with pure image rather than argument, and in certain stretches more nakedly elegiac. It is also, in aggregate, the sequence's most sustained meditation on the comedy of embodiment — the relentless, undignified, often hilarious fact of having a body that farts and ages and desires and fails and finally stops. That this comedy is inseparable from the sequence's deepest pathos is the 2016 installment's central formal discovery.
The sequence opens on "yard sale dentures" and closes, after thousands of entries, on "those after us create the legends of our time" — a trajectory from the discarded remnants of a mouth to the future's act of meaning-making from our debris. This arc is not plotted but accumulated: the sequence does not argue toward its ending so much as arrive at it through the sheer weight of everything that precedes it. The dentures establish the governing tonal register immediately — objects that were intimate, functional, intimate again in their abandonment, and faintly comic in their visibility at a yard sale. The sequence's characteristic move is present from the first entry: the domestic object carrying more than it appears to carry, the ordinary surface concealing and revealing simultaneously.
The form's most distinctive feature in the 2016 installment is its treatment of pure image. Where the 2017 installments frequently extend into argument and aphorism — three-line stanzas that build a position, turn it, qualify it — the 2016 sequence includes a higher proportion of entries that are purely observational, refusing to do anything with what they notice except notice it. "The drowsy dog / raises an ear of alertness / at the sound of his own fart" is not an argument about anything. It is a moment rendered with the precision of a haiku and the comic timing of a perfect joke. "Monarch butterflies suckling dog shit, / their pleasure too intense to care / about being blindsided with a rock" is similarly pure — the juxtaposition of beauty and squalor held without comment, the butterflies' absorption in their pleasure rendering them vulnerable to a violence the poem does not enact but names. These entries trust the image to do all the work, and that trust is itself a formal argument: attention is sufficient; the world, attended to without agenda, is already extraordinary.
The body is the 2016 sequence's most persistent subject, and its treatment of the body is more consistently comic here than in the 2017 installments. The sequence attends to the body's indignities — "farts that interrupt the urine stream," "the shiver after urination," "nitrogen bloat in compacted intestines," "the groan it takes her to exit the sedan" — with an affectionate specificity that refuses both aestheticization and contempt. These are not grotesque details deployed for shock; they are the simple truth of what it is to inhabit a body, rendered with the same quality of attention the sequence brings to dying stars and dying people. The body is comic because it is irreducible — it keeps insisting on itself at the worst moments, it has its own agenda, it will not be dignified by the mind's preferences. The sequence loves it for this.
The dying cluster in the 2016 installment is distributed more diffusely than in 2017, appearing throughout rather than concentrating in sustained meditation. "Hospice workers forever fazed by what not-alive looks like" achieves its effect through a single precise observation: even those who attend death professionally cannot habituate themselves fully to the specific appearance of the thing. "Watching someone die, / only in rare cases / do we want it to end" is among the entire project's most honest formulations — the acknowledgment that grief and love produce a desire for continuation even when continuation is cruelty. "The dead hand still warm" is three words and an entire experience. These entries work through compression and restraint, trusting that the reader brings everything necessary and needs only the trigger.
The addiction thread in 2016 is more autobiographical in feeling than the clinical observation of the 2017 sequence. "Those ecstatic times of highness in that ruining addiction of decades" names both the pleasure and the destruction without separating them — the ecstasy and the ruin are simultaneous, not sequential. "Fleeing the state to escape the drug" names the spatial delusion of addiction: the belief that geography can solve what is interior. "Confidence to quit only when high" is the sequence's most precise formulation of the addiction paradox — the only moment the mind feels sufficiently resourced to stop is the moment it has already stopped stopping. These entries do not moralize; they describe, with the accuracy of someone who has been inside the experience.
The sequence's racial intelligence in 2016 operates somewhat differently than in 2017, with more of the entries working through image and narrative rather than argument. "NWA bumping through an anachronistic boombox / during that barn train: 'She only fourteen and a ho, / but the bitch suck dick like a specialized pro!'" stages the collision of musical vernacular and material reality without editorializing — the anachronism is the point, the barn train context is the point, and the lyric's content acquires a different charge in that staging than it carries as pure cultural product. "The child's love for his maid transcended / color, but soon enough the world / convinced him she was just his tool" is a miniature bildungsroman of racial socialization — the education into seeing that overwrites the child's original clarity.
The theological and cosmological entries in 2016 establish the metaphysical frame that the 2017 sequence will elaborate. "The sun was once the most sensible candidate for god" is epistemologically serious — not a dismissal of religious thought but a recognition that solar worship was rational given the available evidence. "Out of all the wormhole bubbles of the quantum cradle / prior to the Big Bang, the bubble that kept expanding — / our universe — did so by the blow of a sufficient cause" engages the cosmological argument from within the language of contemporary physics, neither capitulating to easy theism nor dismissing the question. "Before stars awoke, the so-called 'primordial chaos' preordained the seeds, / and all the chrysalid resonance patterns of their unfurling, that would bloom / gateways — as came to be here, now, through us — to post-physical songlines" is among the project's most ambitious single entries, tracing an arc from pre-cosmic condition through stellar genesis to human consciousness to something beyond it, all in three lines.
The Amway thread is one of the 2016 installment's most sustained satirical inventions, and it deserves attention as a formal device. The sequence of Ambot speakers — Sapphire, Emerald, Diamond, Double Diamond, Triple Diamond, Crown — each introducing their motivational wisdom with a pop song's opening bars, constitutes a parody of aspirational culture so precise that it becomes, paradoxically, moving. "Stop letting past failures stop you," / says the Emerald Ambot, the synth / opening on Survivor's 'Moment of Truth'" — the song choice is exact, the Ambot's rank appropriate, the wisdom simultaneously hollow and true. These entries are funny, but their comedy contains the specific pathos of sincere belief in a system that extracts what it promises to supply. The Amway thread is the 2016 sequence's sustained portrait of the American Dream's most naked and most pitiable institutional form.
"Sometimes the subject is not to be centered in the viewfinder" appears multiple times in the 2016 installment, operating as a formal refrain and a methodological self-description. The mosaic poem itself enacts this principle: no entry is centered, no subject is given the viewfinder's full attention, everything is caught at an angle or in peripheral vision. The instruction is simultaneously technical advice for photography and epistemological counsel for living — that the subject often reveals itself more fully when approached obliquely, that direct address can frighten away what patient attention would allow to emerge. The entry's repetition gives it the status of a governing principle rather than a single observation.
The "condemning gay sex on grounds that..." series is the 2016 installment's most formally inventive satirical sequence. Each entry follows the same structural template — a stated ground for condemnation, followed by an equally arbitrary "even as you" that exposes the inconsistency — but the grounds and the comparisons accumulate into a comprehensive demolition of the logical bases for the position. The sequence is not hostile to religious belief; it is hostile to inconsistency, to the selective application of principle, to the use of moral argument as cover for preference. The comedy of each entry depends on the precision of the "even as you" — the comparison must be exact enough to expose the double standard without being so distant as to become mere absurdism. "Condemning gay sex on grounds / that Leviticus unequivocally forbids it / even as you toss pigskin footballs and savor lobster and trim your beard" is a complete logical argument in three lines, requiring nothing additional.
The closing movement of the 2016 installment gathers toward its final entries with a quality of earned exhaustion — not defeat but satiation, the mind having moved through enough of the world's material to arrive at something like rest. "The spirit, stealing a glimpse up at the blue / vastness, once again starts rattling the bars / of a world sequestered to concrete slivers" is the sequence's image of its own aspiration: the spirit confined to the fragment, the aphorism, the limited view, but always reaching toward something larger. "We announce ourselves, if only for own ears, proclaiming / our awakened state through the dark beyond dumb matter / wondering what in the void might quicken and speak" names the project's deepest bet — that attention, articulation, the refusal to let experience pass unnamed, is itself a form of reaching into the void and asking whether something answers.
"Those after us create the legends of our time" closes the sequence on an act of faith in retrospection — that the meaning of what has been accumulated here will be made by those who come later, reading from a distance the hive's full roar, finding in its fragments the portrait of a moment that did not know what it was but kept attending, kept noting, kept insisting on the full range of what it meant to be alive and aware at this particular point in the strange, brief, extraordinary experiment of human consciousness.
Meta Description
The 2016 installment of "Made for You and Me" — the founding document of the hive Being project — discovers the mosaic form through sustained attention to embodiment, dying, addiction, racial socialization, cosmological inquiry, and the comedy of ordinary life, arriving through sheer accumulated weight at a faith in retrospection: that those who come after will make the legends of this time from its fragments.
Keywords
Made for You and Me, hive Being, 2016 sequence, mosaic poem, embodiment poetry, yard sale dentures, Amway satire, condemning gay sex series, sometimes the subject, viewfinder poetics, addiction phenomenology, racial socialization, cosmological inquiry, comedy and pathos, fragment poetics, contemporary American poetry, founding document, accumulated attention, aphoristic poetry, human consciousness, retrospection and legend
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--FULL YEAR))
The complete 2017 sequence of "Made for You and Me 2" is the most ambitious document in the project — a mosaic poem of extraordinary length that constitutes, in aggregate, a full phenomenological portrait of American consciousness at a specific historical moment. Where individual installments establish the method and demonstrate its range, the complete sequence reveals the project's true scale: not a collection of aphorisms but a single, continuous act of witness, a sustained attempt to hold the entire bandwidth of human experience — from the cosmological to the scatological, from the tenderly domestic to the politically volcanic — within a form capacious enough to refuse nothing and organize everything by adjacency rather than argument.
The sequence's governing formal wager is that meaning emerges from accumulation and juxtaposition rather than from development or resolution. No single entry explains or leads to the next; each stands at its own irreducible frequency while the aggregate produces something that no individual entry could generate alone. The reader who attempts to move through the sequence linearly will experience something close to cognitive saturation — the sensation of being inside a consciousness processing everything simultaneously, unable to rank or filter, committed to attending to the full range of what it means to be alive and aware in this particular historical moment. This saturation is not failure of organization but the form's central argument: that the attempt to organize, rank, or filter contemporary experience according to any single principle is itself a form of violence against its irreducible complexity.
The sequence's treatment of mortality constitutes its deepest thematic current, running beneath everything else as the ground from which all other observations grow. Dying appears not as a subject among subjects but as the medium through which nearly every other observation is refracted — the dying-literacy argument distributed across dozens of entries, the hospice and bedside observations, the dying done well and done poorly, the medical prolongation of dying, the child allowed knowledge of his dying only when parents leave the room, the "do not go to your death as an amateur" imperative. What accumulates is a sustained argument that the culture's relationship to death is the index of its relationship to everything else — that a civilization unable to attend to dying honestly will be unable to attend honestly to anything. The sequence does not moralize this argument; it demonstrates it by placing death at the center of the mosaic's field of gravity, letting every other observation orbit it at varying distances.
Race is the sequence's most volatile and most carefully sustained subject, and what distinguishes its treatment from either simple critique or simple provocation is the consistency with which it refuses the available political positions. The sequence attacks progressive paternalism — the "predatory help industry," the dependency culture, the lowering of standards in the name of protection — with genuine intellectual force and without the comfort of a safe ideological address. It simultaneously attacks the racial mythology that has historically justified that paternalism and continues to justify its contemporary forms. The factory farming and slavery parallel, the corpses sold for anatomy lessons, the slave on the auction block contradicting seller exaggerations about his own hardiness — these entries hold the history without allowing it to become an alibi for the present. The sequence's racial intelligence is precisely its refusal to allow any position — progressive or conservative, Black nationalist or integrationist — to rest comfortably within its field of attention.
The sequence's treatment of sexuality and the body is similarly refusal-based, operating through the deployment of explicit content not as provocation but as insistence on the body's full presence in any honest account of human experience. The sexual entries are not distributed as titillation across an otherwise serious text; they are integrated into the same field as dying, politics, theology, and aesthetics, governed by the same quality of attention. The smoked aroma on the vibrator weeks after the ice-cream-tub marathon, the play-acting drunk beneath Mom's squirting cowgirl, the moral alibi of the sofa blanket — these entries carry the same analytical weight as the theological arguments and the racial observations because the sequence refuses the conventional hierarchy that treats the body as beneath the dignity of serious thought. Insisting on the body's full presence is itself an argument: that any account of human experience that excludes or aestheticizes the sexual and the scatological is producing a lie about what it is to be human.
The theological thread constitutes the sequence's most philosophically sustained argument, distributed across dozens of entries that collectively constitute a serious engagement with the problem of God rather than a simple dismissal. The pantheist entries — "it is impossible for us to exist estranged completely from that of which / we are completely a function" — stand alongside the skeptical ones, the critiques of organized religion alongside the genuinely awed encounters with the Muslim call to prayer and the possibility of divine light. The sequence does not arrive at atheism; it arrives at a position more complex and more honest — a sustained inquiry into what the concept of God requires, what it cannot accommodate, and what legitimate human experience it is attempting to address. The entries about beings unworthy of worship — beings who prioritize belief over good deeds, who subject finite beings to infinite torture, who need constant reassurance — constitute not a rejection of divinity but a demand for a conception of divinity adequate to the human intuitions it claims to ground.
The addiction cluster is among the sequence's most compassionate and most precisely observed sustained engagements. The entries on addiction do not moralize or pathologize but render the phenomenology of dependency — the addict's promise to the mirror, the part that says "this time at least don't get as bad as before," the subtle shift from using drugs to work to working to use drugs, the one bad trip opening the door, the having money to be a functioning addict — with the same quality of attention the sequence brings to dying and theology. Addiction is understood here not as moral failure but as a form of relationship, often the most reliable relationship available to the person whose other relationships have failed or been foreclosed. The sequence's most devastating addiction entry — "a kid raped so bad thank God he found drugs" — refuses the therapeutic framework that treats substance use as the problem rather than the solution to a prior and more devastating problem.
The sequence's aesthetic self-consciousness is most explicit in its entries about art, writing, and the creative life — a thread that constitutes a sustained ars poetica distributed across the full length of the work. "No matter what you might hear, it is impossible to be / a bad house guest of the World-All" is an aesthetic principle as much as a metaphysical one. "An artist fearful of causing offense is closer to a jingle-writing ad-man" is a direct statement of the sequence's own commitments. The entries about artists needing to be away from the work of other artists, about the license art gives to neglect loved ones, about excellence for which the price of potential humiliation is too high, about seclusion as sacrifice rather than indulgence — these constitute a self-portrait of the conditions under which a project of this ambition and this duration is possible, and the costs it exacts.
The sequence's closing movement — "ours, for always / you too are an I" — arrives after the sustained cacophony of the full mosaic as something close to benediction. "You too are an I" is the sequence's deepest ethical claim, stated with the simplicity available only after the full complexity has been traversed. The entire project — the thousands of fragments, the full range of registers and subjects, the refusal to rank or filter — has been building toward this: the recognition of the other's inner life as the ground of all ethical responsibility and all genuine attention. The mosaic form is itself a demonstration of this claim: every entry, however brief or apparently trivial, is the record of a consciousness attending to something that mattered to it, and the act of attending constitutes the recognition the sequence finally names.
What the complete 2017 sequence of "Made for You and Me 2" achieves is nothing less than a formal argument for a particular mode of consciousness — one that attends to everything without ranking, that holds contradiction without resolving it, that insists on the full presence of the body and the full seriousness of the spirit, that refuses every available comfort of ideology or aesthetics or moral certainty. The hive does not explain itself. It hums at every frequency simultaneously, and the cumulative sound is the most honest account of American experience that the project's extraordinary ambition can produce.
Meta Description
The complete 2017 sequence of "Made for You and Me 2" — a mosaic poem of extraordinary length and ambition — constitutes a full phenomenological portrait of American consciousness: refusing to rank or filter the body, mortality, race, theology, addiction, sexuality, and aesthetic self-consciousness, it builds through adjacency and accumulation toward its final benediction, "you too are an I," as the ground of all genuine attention and all ethical responsibility.
Keywords
Made for You and Me, hive Being, complete 2017 sequence, mosaic poem, phenomenological portrait, dying-literacy, racial paternalism, addiction phenomenology, theological inquiry, aesthetic self-consciousness, aphoristic poetry, adjacency and accumulation, cognitive saturation, American consciousness, contemporary American poetry, ars poetica, body and spirit, ethical attention, benediction, fragment poetics, full bandwidth witness
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 98)
In the closing movements of MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: Hive Being, the poetic voice operates not through the harmonious synthesis of American mythos, but through a brutal, kaleidoscopic assemblage of cultural debris, existential dread, and psychological exposure. Taking its title from the utopian refrain of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” the text functions as an intentional irony: the “you and me” of this landscape is not a sunlit expanse of shared democratic promise, but a crowded, claustrophobic hive of collective trauma, vulgarity, and irreducible mortality. Through a sequence of aphoristic, fragmented stanzas, this section constructs an aesthetics of the edge—a realm where existential philosophy intersects with the grimy, hyper-specific colloquialisms of late-capitalist American life. By examining the dialectical tensions between the abject and the sacred, determinism and agency, and social performance versus internal unraveling, we uncover a work that demands a reckoning with what it means to exist as an “I” within the overwhelming totality of the hive. I. The Abject Horizon: Transgression as Existential Mirror The section opens by plunging the reader directly into the abject. Julia Kristeva posits in Powers of Horror that the abject is that which disturbs system, order, and identity—the borderland where the body confronts its own material decay and taboo desires. The juxtaposition in the opening line—hidden-camera doggy-style peace signs—the garage-sale VHS labeled “Rectal Rooter”—establishes an aesthetic where countercultural idealism (“peace signs”) has been thoroughly commodified and degraded into forgotten, grotesque media artifacts. This tension between the sublime and the profane recurs throughout the stanzas. The "farmer napes leatherized by their ultraviolet god" transforms labor and sun exposure into a pagan ritual where skin is "scored in bloodless diamonds." The sun is not a benevolent force of growth, but an indifferent, searing deity. Similarly, the dark humor of at least the house fire killed all the roaches—“mahfuckas wanted warmth, huh?” illustrates a defense mechanism against catastrophic loss. Pain is blunted through gallows humor, framing destruction as a grotesque irony. Furthermore, images of "neonatal cock sleeves," "bukkake gangbangs," and "carpet boots" function as deliberate shock-probes designed to dismantle bourgeois sensibilities, forcing an encounter with the raw, uncensored mechanics of human desire and disgust. Rather than relying on gratuitous vulgarity, these images serve an essential philosophical purpose: they strip away theoretical abstractions, forcing consciousness to confront its grounding in visceral, decaying matter. II. Determinism, Finitude, and the Violence of Being Underlying the sequence's chaotic imagery is a persistent philosophical inquiry into determinism, mortality, and Martin Heidegger’s concept of Geworfenheit (thrownness)—the state of being cast into a world without prior consent. The stanza observing that a land that pathologizes sadness / would have us ignore the truth: / our finitude, our thrownness directly critiques contemporary society’s imperative toward forced positivity, identifying it as an erasure of fundamental existential truths. The poem repeatedly confronts suicide, decay, and the illusion of control. In the lines describing the man who needed to take off his shoes before he jumped / off the bridge to end himself, and before that / he needed to pee first, the text highlights the terrifying intrusion of mundane physical needs into the gravest existential acts, stripping suicide of romanticism. Later, the image of bugs rising up to the tree zapper in a slow helix seduced by glory, only to drop in a line serves as a bleak allegory for human ambition; seduced by illumination, the collective moves predictably toward its own destruction. Even identity and biology are destabilized under this deterministic lens. The stanza detailing the unmaking a billion years of sex differences in one third-period microplastic wig out captures the blurring of evolutionary biology and industrial pollution, suggesting that human ingenuity inevitably undoes its own foundational categories. Meanwhile, the assertion that history steps outside for a cigarette break now and then frames human events not as a grand, teleological march toward enlightenment, but as an intermittent, chaotic sequence of accidents occurring within an unyielding deterministic framework. III. The Fractured Social Fabric: Tribalism, Race, and Performance The "Hive Being" of the title implies an inescapable interconnectedness, yet the text continuously highlights the friction, prejudice, and isolation that define modern social relations. The poem refuses safe political platitudes, opting instead to present uncomfortable social anxieties in their unvarnished state. In the lines addressing urban paranoia and racial profiling, the speaker acts as an unfiltered observer of social mechanisms, challenging the reader to confront the unspoken calculations of fear, privilege, and societal breakdown. The text quickly shifts this psychological strain to a global, geopolitical scale when describing how child pockets bulge with rocks—not ones / found too pretty to leave in the dirt, but ones / that by some magic of youth will stop tanks. Here, the innocence of childhood is weaponized by desperation; the "magic of youth" is recontextualized not as play, but as asymmetric resistance where toys become anti-tank munitions. Furthermore, the poem repeatedly examines the concept of performance as self-preservation. The observation that not being the person you were trained to perform / is not a contradiction even if you are the one / who trained yourself to perform it echoes Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of bad faith (mauvaise foi). The self is framed as a continuous, exhausting theatrical act where the actor and the director are trapped in the same mind. In a parallel move, the advice to never discipline an artist for doing what an artist does: holding up hurtful mirrors positions the creative force as an exile whose social utility lies precisely in their refusal to conform to polite consensus. IV. Aesthetic Architecture and the Epigrammatic Form Structurally, this portion of MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2 functions through staccato montage. The abrupt transitions between raw street observations, psychological trauma, political satire, and quiet tenderness mirror the modern sensory experience—a hyper-mediated stream of consciousness where tragedy and triviality occupy the same attention span. Consider the swift juxtaposition across three distinct stanzas: Sticking yourself into the tribe so that what underpins that tribe stands out against what underpins you. Hoping this time, this night sleepless, to remember differently that wretched scene long ago. The former pinup model hitting on young men in her eighties still with the old having way. The sudden shifts in scale—from a sweeping sociological critique of tribal identity, to an intimate moment of insomnia and trauma, to an elderly pin-up model maintaining her seductive posture—create an overwhelming sense of temporal compression. Time is actively eroding everything, leading toward the eventual reality that the rain eats away even your name in stone. Yet, despite this pervasive nihilism, the sequence concludes with a subtle, resonant turn toward radical empathy and ontological recognition. The final movement transitions away from the inevitable decay of memory toward an unmistakable affirmation: ours, for always you too are an I Conclusion: The Hive as a Mirror In MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: Hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 98), the text ultimately presents a vision of humanity that is dirty, traumatized, hyper-intelligent, and profoundly vulnerable. By collecting the discarded fragments of American life—from garage-sale videotapes and subway violence to philosophical meditations on determinism and grief—the poem constructs a monument to the endurance of consciousness amidst chaos. It asserts that to exist in the "hive" is to be bruised by the proximity of others, to be horrified by one's own finitude, and yet, in the absolute darkness of that realization, to recognize the subjective reality of the other: "you too are an I." It is a poetic achievement that demands we look into the "hurtful mirror" and refuse to turn away.
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 97)
Part 97 is the installment most preoccupied with the relationship between what is said and what is withheld — between confession and concealment, between the disclosure that changes things and the silence that does too. Its entries return repeatedly to the moment just before or just after speech: the text from under the avalanche, the father who says nothing after the turtle, the person who wants to hear everything and nothing about the betrayal simultaneously. The hive here is tracking the specific frequencies of human communication that operate at the edge of language — where words fail, where silence speaks, where the thing not said carries more weight than anything that could be articulated.
The installment's most formally precise entries concern race and the specific mechanisms through which good intentions produce their opposite. "Devitalized by slavery and then by segregation, but most terribly later by white guilt, / which whispered — in mesmeric repetition — a gospel eerily similar to what heartened / the Transatlantic slave trade: 'A white Savior is your only hope out of the dung'" is the installment's most sustained and most historically specific formulation of this argument. The parallel structure is the entry's formal achievement: the white savior gospel of progressive culture named as structurally continuous with the ideology that justified slavery, not through malice but through the shared premise of Black incapacity. "Black dignity survived slavery and segregation and yet has taken / to the ICU by welfare, itself a mere jab compared to the coddling — / personal, even institutional — of orange-deranged campus whites" extends this into the present, the medical metaphor precise: welfare as a jab that weakened, progressive campus culture as the condition that may prove fatal.
"It seems relevant to point out that many whites who had sex / with blacks, slave or otherwise, figured — by their very own / framework — that they were engaging in a form of bestiality" revisits the argument of "Sin Against Nature" in compressed aphoristic form — the slaveholder's own ideology indicting him within his own terms, the point made without elaboration because it requires none.
"Let the poetry of the political statement / better stand out by stripping out / all references to particular groups" is the installment's most formally self-aware entry and its most direct statement of the project's own compositional method. The political argument achieves its maximum force, the entry proposes, when it operates at the level of structure rather than particularity — when the reader must supply the specific referents rather than receiving them pre-labeled. This is a genuine aesthetic position, and its placement within the installment it describes is the kind of self-referential move the mosaic form makes possible.
"Triggered at every corner, desperate for spaces safe / from nanoaggressions — are women today trained, / as if by a secret patriarchy, to be fainting Victorians?" achieves the installment's most compressed formulation of the fragility critique. The Victorian comparison is precise: the fainting women of the nineteenth century were produced by a culture that both idealized and enforced their weakness, their fragility a performance of femininity that was simultaneously genuine and manufactured. The entry asks whether contemporary progressive culture has produced an analogous formation — the frailty now called "triggered" rather than "delicate," the smelling salts replaced by safe spaces, the patriarchy operating not through prohibition but through the inculcation of vulnerability as identity.
"Addiction to the same drugs becomes a crime, not a disease, when it ravages group x — / that sounds less bigoted than pious elites, poisoners in healer guise, have made it sound / if group x has proven a blight: loud all night; lewd and entitled; slovenly and violent" is the installment's most deliberately uncomfortable entry on race and drug policy — uncomfortable because it refuses to resolve into either the standard progressive critique of differential criminalization or the conservative dismissal of that critique. The entry holds both the legitimate observation about differential treatment and the uncomfortable empirical claim that behavior patterns may affect the application of that treatment, without collapsing either into the other.
"Hurting yourself in order to hurt others who care, this morphed / as your facial hair grew (in part because it grew) into just hurting / yourself — and still no one, not even you, came to save you" is the installment's most quietly devastating entry, tracing the developmental arc of self-harm from its communicative function — the wound as message, the suffering as bid for rescue — to its terminal form: the habit that has outlasted its original purpose, now just hurting, with no audience and no expected response. "And still no one, not even you, came to save you" names the abandonment that is also self-abandonment, the person who waited for rescue and eventually stopped expecting it and kept hurting anyway.
"So silent as a father that he said nothing / to his son back in the truck after stopping / to lift a turtle from the middle of the road" closes the installment on one of the project's most perfectly realized images of paternal failure. The turtle rescue is a moment of genuine tenderness — the father stopping, getting out, performing an act of care for a creature in danger. And then the silence in the truck afterward, the son beside him, the moment of potential connection unused. The turtle gets lifted. The son gets nothing. The installment ends there, on that silence, which is the right place to end.
Meta Description
The 97th installment of the mosaic poem tracks the frequencies of human communication at language's edge — confession and concealment, the white savior gospel as structural heir to slavery's premise, the Victorian fragility of triggered culture, the developmental arc of self-harm from communication to habit, and the father who lifts a turtle from the road and says nothing to his son in the truck afterward.
Keywords
Made for You and Me, hive Being, mosaic poem, part 97, white savior gospel, slavery and progressive paternalism, triggered and Victorian fragility, self-harm developmental arc, paternal silence, turtle and son, nanoaggressions, addiction and differential criminalization, political poetry and particularity, text under avalanche, aphoristic poetry, 2017 poetry, contemporary American poetry, fragment poetics, silence and speech
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 96)
Part 96 achieves the mosaic's most fluid integration of its characteristic registers — the comic, the philosophical, the politically precise, and the quietly devastating — moving with a confidence that suggests the form has fully internalized its own logic. The installment's distributed argument concerns the relationship between categories and the lives they fail to contain: racial categories, gender categories, diagnostic categories, the categories through which we organize desire, guilt, and social belonging. Nearly every entry stages a moment in which a category is applied, inverted, or exposed as insufficient, and the cumulative effect is a portrait of a culture drowning in its own taxonomic apparatus.
The installment opens on a sequence of situational ironies rendered with the economy the mosaic form demands at its best. "Pool baptism electrocutions" holds the sacred and the lethal in a single image without comment. "Pillow talk of saying that your pillow talk is not really pillow talk" is the installment's most compressed rendering of the self-canceling discourse of intimacy — the meta-statement that undermines itself in the act of being made. "Running away from what we keep waiting for, as if we loved the waiting more" achieves genuine psychological precision about the ambivalence that structures desire: the possibility that the waiting is the point, and arrival is the threat. These three entries establish the installment's governing mode — the observation that names something real without explaining it away.
"Mowing their lawn all summer as restitution for flashing their daughter" is the installment's most quietly devastating comic entry. The restitution is real — labor performed in genuine shame — and the disproportion between the offense and the gesture is the entry's subject without being its explicit content. The lawn mowing is both inadequate and all that is available, which is the entry's actual observation about the limited instruments through which guilt attempts to repair itself.
The political cluster achieves the installment's sharpest formulations. "Policers of machinated races / adamant that her passing for x / disrespects real x people" extends the project's sustained engagement with identity policing — the enforcement of categorical authenticity by those who have designated themselves its guardians. The parallel entries on transgender and transracial identity — "insisting that he can never become a woman / because he has not lived as a woman indicates, / inadvertently, the way for becoming a woman" and "insisting that she can never become black / because she has not lived as a black indicates, / inadvertently, the way for becoming black" — form the installment's most formally precise philosophical diptych. Each entry identifies the same logical structure: the objection to passing inadvertently specifies the conditions for its achievement. The parallel placement insists on the structural equivalence of the two cases without arguing for or against either, which is the entries' characteristic intelligence.
"The anxious to prove that they are much better than their ancestors, / the new whites — in their efforts to undo the crippling effects / of the old whites — solidify the narrative that blacks are inferior" is the installment's most compressed statement of the progressive paternalism argument that runs throughout the larger project. The mechanism named here is precise: the performative anti-racism that requires Black inferiority as its premise, and therefore produces it as its conclusion. The entry does not argue that the new whites are insincere. It argues that their sincerity is irrelevant to the structural effect of what they do.
"Marinated as long as they were in the Judeo-Christian morality (where being a victim / grants the superiority of innocence), can you blame blacks — in a nation made wealthy / on their backs — for overplaying the victim card (even if it means remaining victims)?" is the installment's most philosophically generous entry on race, and its generosity is structural rather than sentimental. The question holds simultaneously the legitimacy of the grievance, the rational incentive structure of victim identity within a specific moral framework, and the cost of that identity to the people who inhabit it. "Even if it means remaining victims" is the entry's most precise formulation: the trap is not malicious but logical, the victimhood that grants innocence also requiring that the victim remain a victim to retain that grant.
"Trigger-hand trepidant during his maiden purse stickup, he rapes to save face" is the installment's most compressed standalone narrative — the entire psychological arc of "Purse" rendered in a single line, the botched robbery and the compensatory rape held in their causal relationship without the poem's extended formal elaboration. Its placement within the mosaic gives it a different quality than the standalone poem: here it is one data point among many in the hive's larger catalogue of human failure and its consequences.
"The smartest brain ever crushed with a rock" is the installment's most purely devastating entry — the entire history of human violence against intelligence, against potential, against whatever might have been, held in eight words. No elaboration is possible or necessary.
The installment's treatment of desire and its displacements achieves several precise formulations. "Seasoned enough no longer to panic / about getting too attached, you panic / about her getting too attached now" names the specific inversion of attachment anxiety that experience produces: the fear moves from one's own vulnerability to the other person's, and the shift is not wisdom but a different form of the same fear. "Behind a book on the subway, in wait / for the brown skin girl to shift some — / any — section of her fine self" renders desire's patience with the specific detail of the book as cover, the waiting organized entirely around the possibility of movement, any movement, in any direction. "Realizing your love for someone whom / you did not know you loved is often code / for what can be a boon: lowered expectations" is the installment's most unsentimental observation about retroactive love — the recognition that what presents as discovery may be the belated acceptance of something one had been refusing to call by its name.
The installment closes on the victim card entry, which is the right closing note: the installment's largest and most philosophically sustained observation placed last, its question mark the appropriate final punctuation for a sequence that has been staging questions throughout without providing answers. The hive does not resolve. It accumulates, and what it accumulates here is a portrait of a culture whose categories — racial, sexual, diagnostic, moral — are simultaneously the only tools available and persistently inadequate to the lives they are meant to organize.
Meta Description
The 96th installment of the mosaic poem pursues the relationship between categories and the lives they fail to contain — moving through identity policing, the logical trap of progressive paternalism, the inadvertent specification of passing's conditions, the rationality of victim identity within Judeo-Christian moral frameworks, and the compressed standalone narrative of compensatory rape, building a portrait of a culture drowning in taxonomic apparatus that cannot do the work it has been assigned.
Keywords
Made for You and Me, hive Being, mosaic poem, part 96, identity policing, transracialism and transgenderism parallel, progressive paternalism, victim card rationality, Judeo-Christian innocence, passing and authenticity, maiden purse stickup, smartest brain crushed, attachment anxiety inversion, lowered expectations and love, aphoristic poetry, 2017 poetry, contemporary American poetry, fragment poetics, category and inadequacy
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 95)
This installment of Stanzas continues the project's signature mosaic technique while pushing it toward an increasingly philosophical investigation of moral ambiguity, memory, mortality, and the instability of ethical judgment. The sequence abandons narrative continuity in favor of a rapid succession of aphoristic scenes, each functioning as a compressed moral experiment. Rather than presenting arguments, the poem presents collisions: innocence against corruption, transcendence against degradation, idealism against biological reality, public ideology against private experience. The result is not simply a catalog of observations but a phenomenology of consciousness itself—a portrait of what it feels like to inhabit a modern mind saturated with conflicting ethical claims.
Perhaps the installment's defining feature is its refusal to divide the world into heroes and villains. Again and again, virtues and vices become inseparable. The opening image—"filching from the lemonade-stand as you help the little girl make change"—compresses generosity and theft into a single gesture. The adult simultaneously assists and exploits the child. This paradox establishes the governing logic for the remainder of the sequence. Likewise, "doing something you hate with someone you love" refuses sentimental assumptions that affection redeems unpleasant labor or that meaningful work must necessarily be enjoyable. Throughout the poem, emotional and moral categories continually bleed into one another.
Many of the fragments expose the inheritance of corruption across generations. Fathers "embolden us to steal from our employers." Grandfathers provide painkillers to sell to classmates. Parents profess unconditional love while desperately imposing dogma. These are not monstrous caricatures but recognizable distortions of ordinary familial authority. The family becomes less a sanctuary than the primary mechanism through which both virtues and dysfunctions are transmitted. Such observations resonate with psychological theories emphasizing intergenerational trauma while resisting the temptation to reduce moral agency to deterministic inheritance.
Running alongside these familial observations is a sustained meditation on self-deception. Several entries dissect the stories human beings tell themselves in order to preserve coherence. Retirement is imagined not primarily as liberation but as the loss of busyness that concealed abandoned dreams. The refrigerator repeatedly opened despite nothing changing becomes a quietly devastating metaphor for magical thinking. Fantasy conversations with one's crush illustrate rehearsed realities preferred over genuine uncertainty. Reunions become opportunities not simply to meet old acquaintances but to discover the alternate selves one's life might have produced. Even memory itself is questioned: parents treasure moments their children never retain, exposing recollection as radically asymmetrical.
The installment repeatedly investigates perception as an unreliable instrument. "Appearing happy from far away" condenses an entire sociology of appearances into five words. The psychic who relies upon leading questions succeeds because human cognition privileges improbable confirmations over countless failures. The "fuzzy line between what you want to see and what you see" explicitly names a cognitive bias that has silently informed many preceding fragments. Rather than condemning individual delusion, the poem suggests that selective perception is constitutive of consciousness itself.
Death and mortality emerge as persistent organizing principles. Yet these meditations avoid conventional elegiac sentimentality. One striking fragment asks whether grief partly consists not merely in releasing a loved one from suffering but also in being released from the obligations of caregiving. Such a question would ordinarily be considered socially unacceptable precisely because it reveals emotions many mourners experience but hesitate to acknowledge. Similarly, "mothering the dying" transforms caregiving into an inversion of infancy, suggesting that the end of life often mirrors its beginning. Elsewhere, hearing a physician declare one's death while consciousness remains intensely vivid evokes neurological phenomena associated with cardiac arrest while simultaneously destabilizing simplistic distinctions between life and death. Rather than presenting death as philosophical abstraction, these observations expose its unsettling psychological textures.
The poem frequently juxtaposes transcendence with biological reality. "The bliss of losing control" can refer equally to religious ecstasy, orgasm, intoxication, artistic inspiration, or psychological collapse. The ambiguity is deliberate. Likewise, "able to masturbate because of them, / hands free us from the raging drive / that allows little time to name things" humorously transforms human anatomy into an evolutionary explanation for civilization itself. Sexuality here is neither celebrated nor condemned but treated as one among many biological pressures shaping consciousness. Elsewhere, the observation regarding "the rapey factor of so much animal sex" forces readers to confront the discomforting distance between evolutionary behavior and modern moral language, reminding us that ethical vocabularies cannot be seamlessly projected onto nature.
Political and ideological tensions appear throughout the sequence, but the poem consistently resists reducing them to slogans. Instead, it stages competing truths. One passage notes that understanding another group's lived experience is presented as a moral imperative while simultaneously suggesting that believing one could fully understand such experience risks another form of arrogance. The fragment refuses easy resolution because each side critiques the excesses of the other. Likewise, the observation about racial profiling in bank loans provocatively acknowledges statistical realities while inviting reflection upon the ethical costs of acting upon them. Whether readers ultimately accept or reject the reasoning, the fragment's literary function is less to persuade than to expose the uncomfortable friction between empirical generalization and individual justice.
Several entries likewise examine how language increasingly moralizes ordinary interaction. The suggestion that every action—even saying hello—can become a "nanoaggression" questions not whether historical injustice exists but how finely moral scrutiny should penetrate everyday behavior. The poem repeatedly returns to the phenomenon of ethical inflation, wherein increasingly minute actions become invested with ever greater symbolic significance. Rather than dismissing such developments outright, the sequence asks what psychological consequences emerge when consciousness becomes permanently vigilant toward hidden offenses.
Throughout the installment, modern technology and media quietly shape experience. Phone-sex operators cultivate racially coded vocal neutrality. Delivery uniforms alter social vulnerability. Pornography collides absurdly with flies outdoors. Rap videos require paper hoods. None of these observations is elaborated; each appears momentarily before disappearing beneath the next. This rapid turnover reproduces the contemporary information environment itself, where radically different realities coexist within seconds of one another.
One of the sequence's recurring philosophical concerns is aspiration. "Only concerned with learning how to take off and fly, never how to land" becomes a metaphor for countless domains: ambition without sustainability, romance without maintenance, intoxication without recovery, technological innovation without ethical foresight. Similarly, "should we even call it 'determination' if rain washes it away?" questions whether virtues deserve their names when they prove conditional. The poem continually distinguishes between ideals imagined in abstraction and virtues tested under circumstance.
The final movement increasingly emphasizes fragility. Good health is unknowable until it disappears. Churches contain faces empty of interpersonal demands yet full of divine demands. Childhood nostalgia becomes romantic manipulation. The key to someone's heart can literally break in the lock. Santa collapses deflated across suburban lawns. These images illustrate entropy operating simultaneously upon bodies, institutions, symbols, and relationships. Yet the poem never descends into nihilism. Indeed, one of its most hopeful observations argues that neither complacent self-acceptance nor achievement-dependent self-worth suffices; rather, authentic flourishing requires loving oneself throughout the process of striving. This fragment quietly serves as an ethical center for the collection, balancing ambition with compassion.
The concluding meditation on the final day before incarceration exemplifies the installment's broader achievement. The question is not simply how one spends such a day but whether genuine enjoyment remains psychologically possible once freedom has acquired an expiration date. This is characteristic of Stanzas: external events matter less than the altered structure of consciousness they produce. Every fragment asks not merely what happens but what it feels like for reality itself to become newly configured.
Formally, this installment demonstrates the continued power of the mosaic aesthetic. Each fragment gains resonance through juxtaposition rather than explanation. Comic observations sharpen tragic ones; philosophical aphorisms interrupt scenes of ordinary embarrassment; political controversy gives way to intimate grief. Readers are forced into the active role of constructing relationships among seemingly disparate experiences. The sequence thus resembles consciousness more than argument: nonlinear, recursive, ethically unstable, forever oscillating between memory, observation, fear, desire, and speculation.
Ultimately, this installment presents modern existence as a continuous negotiation between competing truths that resist synthesis. It neither celebrates contradiction nor seeks to resolve it. Instead, it inhabits contradiction as the natural condition of reflective life. In doing so, Stanzas continues its ambitious project of creating not merely a collection of observations but a phenomenological atlas of contemporary consciousness—one in which every fragment, however small, becomes another facet of the inexhaustible complexity of being human.
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 94)
Part 94 is the most tonally democratic installment of the sequence — its range spanning the cosmic, the comic, the grotesque, and the quietly devastating with an evenhandedness that refuses to signal which register deserves the most serious attention. Where earlier installments organized themselves around governing pressures, Part 94 achieves something closer to pure hive logic: every frequency at once, none subordinated, the sequence trusting its own accumulation to generate meaning rather than imposing it from above. The installment's distributed argument, insofar as it has one, concerns the relationship between perception and its blind spots — the things we cannot see because of where we are standing, the things we will not see because of what seeing them would require of us.
The sequence's most sustained philosophical thread concerns the relationship between knowledge and its costs. "The burden of the call to act is an incentive not to recognize the problem" is the installment's most compressed epistemological observation — naming the specific mechanism by which moral perception is blocked not by ignorance but by the implications of clarity. If you see the problem fully, you must act on it; if acting on it is costly, the mind has reason to not quite see it fully. The installment's "show-me-where-this-is-illegal thinking / versus would-this-be-okay- / to-subject-my-mother-to? thinking" extends this into ethical methodology: two different frameworks for evaluating action, one looking for explicit prohibition and finding its absence a green light, the other running the action through the filter of intimate human relationship. The gap between these frameworks is where most ordinary harm occurs.
"The scholar's bane: the desire / to be right trumping the desire / to cultivate happy relationships" and "the professor failed merely because she failed to open herself to vulnerability" belong to the same cluster — observations about the specific ways intellectual identity can become a defense against the very human contact that makes intellectual work meaningful. The scholar's desire to be right is not simply vanity; it is a form of self-protection that happens to produce real relational damage. The professor's failure is not intellectual but phenomenological: the classroom requires the same openness that any genuine encounter requires, and the armor of expertise can foreclose it.
The evolutionary psychology entries form one of the installment's most quietly ambitious clusters. "Erectus ancestors who smiled at faces as infants were more likely to enjoy protections, / and so now infants smile at faces and, for extra reasons, adults — in anxiety too buried / to seem like anxiety — spot faces even where none exist (as in clouds and star clusters)" traces a behavioral inheritance from survival advantage to perceptual compulsion to the specific adult anxiety that produces pareidolia. The sequence is complete and the logic is exact: we see faces in clouds because our ancestors who smiled at faces survived, and the same mechanism that protected them now generates the anxiety of finding intention and presence in randomness. "Were we all psycho, we could play with our kids / without any need to dehumanize the people / that we wipe out or even just perform surgery on" follows a related logic: the psychological distance required for violence and surgery alike is a feature of normal inhibition, not pathology, and its absence in certain states is what allows both the play and the harm.
The grief entries carry the installment's deepest emotional weight without announcing themselves. "In front of your dead friend's house / tossing a ball, almost expecting him / to burst through the front door" achieves its force through the specific physics of grief's denial — the body enacting the habitual expectation that the mind knows is impossible, the throw aimed at a return that cannot come. "Sitting on her couch, the ghost tries in vain to hug his grieving wife" inverts the usual ghost story: not the living haunted by the dead but the dead haunted by their inability to comfort the living, their presence useless at the moment when presence would matter most. "That the dead haunt the living is one thing, but even / more disturbing is that they are reduced to doing so / merely by making doll eyes blink for night janitors" deflates the supernatural entirely — the dead's only available instrument of contact is the accidental and the overlooked, the blinking doll that only the night janitor witnesses. The reduction of haunting to this is the entry's comedy and its horror simultaneously.
"Grateful for the child you wished was never born" is the installment's most compressed psychological reversal — the retrospective gratitude that coexists with the memory of its own prior absence, the parent who arrives at love through a path that included its explicit rejection. "Their release captured by news cameras / in the lot, some of the first-graders skip / as parents scan to find their child alive" places a school shooting's aftermath in a single image without naming the event — the skipping children and the scanning parents simultaneously, the ordinary childhood gesture of skipping made almost unbearable by its context.
"What would become of you, your art, were you no longer despairing, neurotic?" is the installment's most direct engagement with the relationship between psychological suffering and creative production — the artist's specific fear that the condition producing the work is inseparable from the work itself, that cure and silencing are the same event. The installment's "freed from a state of mind through describing it in writing" belongs to the same cluster as its counterpoint: description as liberation, or description as the only available form of it.
"Even if the light at death is just retinal flaring / or the overhead ER light, why must that be / incompatible with that light being Love?" is the installment's most theologically generous entry, and its generosity is formal rather than sentimental. The question does not claim that the light is Love. It asks why the materialist explanation and the theological one must be mutually exclusive — why the physical mechanism and the metaphysical meaning cannot occupy the same event. This is the sequence's most open-handed moment: not an argument for belief but a resistance to the closure that dismissal requires.
"The importance of mere lipstick / among the women in that city / besieged by snipers and bombs" is the installment's most morally precise entry about dignity under extremity — the word "mere" doing the entry's entire work by naming the dismissal it refuses. Lipstick is not mere in a city under siege; it is the maintenance of a self that the siege is trying to destroy, the insistence on a form of beauty that has nothing to do with survival and everything to do with remaining human. The entry does not explain this. It names the lipstick and the siege in proximity and trusts the reader to feel the gap between "mere" and what the lipstick actually is.
Formally, Part 94 achieves its most relaxed relationship with its own formal variety — the entries feel less curated than accumulated, as though the intelligence producing them has stopped deciding what belongs and is simply recording what the day yields. This relaxation is itself a formal argument: the hive in its natural state does not select. It receives everything, processes everything, makes honey from whatever arrives. The installment's final entry — "the more our economy becomes cashless / the more the preference shifts for drugs / that can be purchased with credit cards" — closes on a note of pure sociological observation, the underground economy adapting to the surface economy's technological shifts with the same pragmatic efficiency. The hive hums on.
Meta Description
The 94th installment of the mosaic poem achieves pure hive logic — moving across perceptual blind spots, the scholar's relational failures, evolutionary psychology and pareidolia, grief's impossible physics, the lipstick of besieged women, and the theological generosity of asking why retinal flaring and Love must be incompatible, trusting accumulation rather than argument to generate meaning from whatever the day yields.
Keywords
Made for You and Me, hive Being, mosaic poem, part 94, perceptual blind spots, burden of recognition, scholar's bane, evolutionary psychology, pareidolia, grief and denial, ghost and grieving wife, school shooting aftermath, art and despair, lipstick under siege, retinal flaring and Love, cashless economy and drugs, aphoristic poetry, 2017 poetry, contemporary American poetry, fragment poetics, hive logic
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 93)
Part 93 is the most formally various and emotionally wide-ranging installment of the sequence, moving between the cosmic and the intimate, the comic and the devastating, with a fluency that makes the transitions feel less like juxtaposition and more like the natural movement of a single consciousness across a full day's worth of perception. Where earlier installments organized themselves around a governing pressure — complicity, dying, category, epistemology — Part 93 resists any single organizing theme, achieving instead something closer to the sequence's fullest realization of the hive metaphor itself: every frequency simultaneously, none subordinated to any other.
The installment's emotional center, distributed across several entries, concerns the relationship between self-knowledge and self-destruction — the specific territory where honest self-perception and its pathological forms become difficult to distinguish. "Telling yourself that it is hope / for tomorrow, rather than cowardice, / that stops you from killing yourself" is the sequence's most direct engagement with suicidal ideation, and its formal precision is what makes it literature rather than clinical description. The stanza does not adjudicate between the two interpretations — hope versus cowardice — but holds them in genuine tension, naming the self-accusation that accompanies the decision to continue living without either validating the accusation or dismissing it. The observation is psychologically exact: the person who stays alive sometimes cannot be certain whether they are staying from genuine attachment to the future or from the failure of nerve that suicide would require. The poem names this uncertainty without resolving it, which is the only honest position available.
"What you would be like — other than like a young child — if you did not hate yourself?" achieves a comparable precision from a different angle. The parenthetical qualifier — "other than like a young child" — is the stanza's most important element: it acknowledges that the self without self-hatred would be, in some fundamental sense, innocent, open, undefended in the way children are before they learn the evaluative gaze. The question does not promise that self-hatred can be removed or that its removal would produce flourishing. It simply names what precedes it developmentally, which is its own form of indictment of what self-hatred costs.
"Even if self-hatred is learned, does that mean it is uncalled for?" is the installment's most philosophically compressed entry in this cluster, and it refuses the easy therapeutic response. The constructivist account of self-hatred — that it is culturally produced, learned, not intrinsic — is usually deployed as a reason to dismiss it. The poem asks whether learned and uncalled-for are actually synonymous. This is a genuine philosophical question: some learned responses are accurate responses to actual conditions, and the poem does not pretend otherwise.
The installment's treatment of intimacy and its disruptions forms its other major emotional thread. "A toxic culture where desiring innermost intimacy / is being desperate, and where being desperate / is worse than being either a slut or a prude" names a specific cultural hierarchy that has installed emotional need below sexual casualness in the register of acceptable vulnerability — where the body's availability is less shameful than the heart's hunger. "Talking over the silence with an other, intimacy becoming too intense" renders the mechanism by which intimacy is disrupted at the moment of its greatest depth: the compulsive speech that fills the silence before it can become too revealing, the person who retreats into noise exactly when genuine contact becomes available. "That point where more love has faded than will appear" is the installment's most quietly devastating temporal observation — the moment in a relationship when the arithmetic turns, when what has been lost exceeds what can still come, named without drama or self-pity.
The perception cluster extends the sequence's sustained interest in how consciousness frames its experience. "How much of you it shows that you read birdsong / not as emanations of 'I'm the one to be loved' / but rather as wails of 'Who, oh who, will love me?'" is the installment's most elegant observation about projection — the way the same sound, the same natural phenomenon, is organized by the listening consciousness according to its own internal weather. The birdsong does not change; what changes is the psychological posture of the listener, and the poem proposes that this posture is diagnostic. "Every scenario can be seen as miraculous: / how can one explain your bed sheets being / wrinkled exactly as they are this morning?" extends this into a genuine phenomenological claim: the improbability of any specific configuration of matter is statistically equivalent to miracle, and the failure to experience it as such is a failure of attention rather than a fact about the world.
"Roofied into the deboned pliability you had not felt since the changing table" is the installment's most disturbing single entry, connecting drug-facilitated assault to infantile helplessness in a formulation that is precise rather than gratuitous. The changing table is the site of the infant's total physical dependence — the body completely passive, positioned and managed by another's hands. The roofied body returns to that state, and the poem names this return without elaboration, trusting the comparison to carry its full weight.
The political and social entries achieve the installment's sharpest formulations of institutional self-perpetuation. "Bullying campaigns against bullying keeps bullying alive, which is the point" states bluntly what the sequence has approached from multiple angles: that the infrastructure built to address a problem has an interest in the problem's continuation. "Incentives to exaggerate statistics to sustain the victim culture" makes the parallel argument about grievance infrastructure. "Citing prison letters, crazed from solitary confinement, as grounds for parole denial" identifies a specific cruelty embedded in institutional logic: the evidence of harm produced by imprisonment used to justify continued imprisonment, the system converting its own damage into justification for its perpetuation.
"Facing that history could go on without her (only one person, after all) / opened her to surrender herself to that one door — opened her, that is, / to shut doors that, kept open, kept her world large only on the surface" is the installment's most formally complex observation about the relationship between limitation and depth. The acceptance of one's dispensability to history — the recognition that the world does not require any particular individual — is rendered here not as despair but as a kind of liberation: the narrowing that produces genuine commitment rather than the false expansiveness of kept-open options. This is the installment's most direct engagement with the philosophical tradition of productive limitation.
The installment closes on the image of a side of town where everyone coughs all night, "rooting for maximal mucosal yield" — a final image of communal suffering rendered in the comic register of shared biological hope. The comedy is not dismissive; it is the sequence's characteristic move of finding in grotesque physical particularity a form of solidarity. Everyone in the coughing ward wants the same thing, and that wanting-in-common is its own kind of community, however unglamorous its object.
Meta Description
The 93rd installment of the mosaic poem achieves the sequence's fullest realization of the hive form — moving across suicidal self-accusation, the hierarchy of intimacy over sexuality in contemporary shame culture, projection and birdsong, institutional self-perpetuation, and the liberation of accepting one's dispensability to history, without subordinating any frequency to any other.
Keywords
Made for You and Me, hive Being, mosaic poem, part 93, suicidal self-accusation, self-hatred and learning, intimacy disruption, birdsong and projection, roofie and changing table, bullying campaigns, institutional self-perpetuation, victim culture statistics, productive limitation, contemporary American poetry, 2017 poetry, fragment poetics, aphoristic poetry, communal suffering, hive form
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 92)
Part 92 is the most epistemologically focused installment of the 2017 sequence, its governing pressure less the social and political range of earlier installments than the question of how consciousness relates to its own operations — how we know, how we prepare, how we deceive ourselves, how we remain both inside and outside our own experience simultaneously. The sequence moves through perception, grief, addiction, profiling, emotional self-sabotage, and the phenomenology of depression with a consistent interest in the gap between what we tell ourselves we are doing and what we are actually doing — the con, the slide, the hypnosis, the sunk cost, the tragic gift that blocks as it enables.
The sequence opens on two images that stage its governing tension between connection and its disruption. "Ashram Wi-Fi" is the installment's most compressed cultural contradiction — the retreat from the world's noise requiring, or at least permitting, the world's noise to follow. The spiritual and the networked cannot be cleanly separated; the ashram has capitulated or the Wi-Fi has been sanctified, and the single two-word entry leaves both possibilities open. "The blind feeling out messages in unplanned bumps" follows as the sequence's most quietly beautiful image — touch reading what sight cannot, the unplanned bump becoming legible through attention rather than design. Together the two entries frame what follows: a sequence interested in what gets through despite interference and what gets blocked despite effort.
The installment's most sustained philosophical thread concerns the relationship between foreknowledge and experience. "Going into an experience thinking you already know / what it is to have it — the tragic gift of teachers, coaches — / means being blocked from having it only in one sense" is the sequence's most careful epistemological formulation. The teacher's advance knowledge of an experience is simultaneously an asset (they can prepare, guide, anticipate) and a deprivation (they cannot encounter it fresh, cannot be surprised by it, cannot have it the way the student has it). The "only in one sense" qualification is crucial — the blocking is real but partial, and the poem refuses the simpler version of the claim that would make experience and knowledge simply opposed. Similarly, "dwelling on what will happen next helps us prepare and ultimately keeps us hooked / to life, but it takes us out of the moment — well, since we are always in the moment, / better to say 'out of the sanctioned moment'" performs a live philosophical self-correction within the stanza itself, the mind catching its own imprecision and revising. The correction is the argument: consciousness is always in some moment, and what anticipation forecloses is not the moment but the moment we have decided should be the one we're in.
Depression receives the installment's most psychologically exact treatment. "Depression is a con-artist: it cons us / into normalizing three naps and makes us / ashamed to admit having been its victim" names two of the condition's most insidious operations simultaneously — the normalization that makes severity invisible, and the shame that follows recognition. The shame is the con's second move: having persuaded you that three naps are ordinary, it then persuades you that having been deceived is a failing rather than a symptom. This connects to the installment's broader interest in self-deception: "hypnotizing yourself to believe the lie" and "falling for your own pillow talk — meant to make the asymmetry lean the other way" belong to the same family of observations about the self as an unreliable narrator of its own states.
The grief stanzas carry the sequence's deepest emotional weight without announcing themselves as such. "The one in whom you wanted — you needed — / to confide about your pain from the divorce / was the very one from whom you divorced" achieves its effect through structural irony: the loss and the need for consolation about the loss share the same address, and the person best equipped to understand the grief is constitutively unavailable to receive it. "Your own child killed in the school massacre / do you step up as that neighbor parent / for survivors, or do you avoid eyes with them?" poses an unanswerable social and ethical question about grief's relationship to community — whether devastation produces solidarity or the unbearable mirroring that makes proximity to other survivors impossible. The poem does not answer; the question's irresolvability is the observation.
"To become enraged at the man who killed your child / is to let him wound you twice — unless, of course, rage dips / deep enough into analgesic eros to be worth any time" is the installment's most philosophically unsettling formulation of grief and desire. The first clause states a recognizable therapeutic position — sustained rage extends the perpetrator's damage. The qualification complicates it entirely: if rage descends deep enough to become its own form of analgesia, its own erotic charge, then the calculus changes and the double wound may be worth its cost. The poem does not endorse this but refuses to dismiss it, holding the possibility open with the characteristic "unless" that the sequence deploys throughout when it finds simple positions insufficient.
The profiling stanzas constitute the installment's most politically charged cluster, and they handle the subject with the same structural even-handedness applied elsewhere. "Failing to profile by race or gender, or by power of locution or whatever, is a slander / to the Holy Ghost that gifted us wisdom since we were ocean critters, but it is also / a slander to remain closed to exceptions to the rule or to the call to revise the rule" constructs a genuine dialectic: the evolved heuristic is real and has survival value; its application without revision is also a failure of the same intelligence that produced it. "How do you not feel scared when experience — / the boots on the ground of Locke, of Hume — / has trained you to think they are dangerous?" extends this into phenomenology: the fear is not simply prejudice but empirically conditioned response, and the poem refuses to pretend otherwise while equally refusing to treat conditioned response as final authority. "African cab drivers not wanting to pick up African American customers" places the same dynamic inside a single racial community, where the profiling logic operates free of the usual interracial framing.
The installment's most formally delicate entry is the plastic bag: "a plastic bag caught in a cactus, unable to do its wind dance." The image belongs to the sequence's recurrent interest in objects and creatures prevented from being what they are by the environments that have captured them — the depressive normalized into three naps, the teacher blocked from fresh experience, the consciousness dwelling in the future rather than the sanctioned present. The bag's "wind dance" is its nature; the cactus is not malicious but simply there. Capture and inability are rendered without blame, which is the image's particular quality of sadness.
"Is it more the overgrown weeds / or the one buried below them / that calls you to the cemetery?" closes the installment on its most condensed meditation on grief, neglect, and what summons us to the places where we keep the dead. The question holds two kinds of attention in balance — the attention to visible disrepair and the attention to the buried person — and asks which has more pull, which constitutes the truer call. The answer, characteristically, is not given. The poem ends at the question, which is the only honest position available.
Meta Description
The 92nd installment of the mosaic poem turns inward toward epistemology and self-deception — moving through the blocking power of foreknowledge, depression's con-artist operations, grief's irresolvable social demands, the dialectic of profiling, and the phenomenology of being always in some moment while missing the sanctioned one, building a cumulative portrait of consciousness as an unreliable narrator of its own states.
Keywords
Made for You and Me, hive Being, mosaic poem, part 92, epistemology poetry, self-deception, depression con-artist, foreknowledge and experience, grief and divorce, school massacre poetry, profiling dialectic, analgesic eros, ashram Wi-Fi, plastic bag cactus, cemetery elegy, phenomenology of anticipation, aphoristic poetry, 2017 poetry, contemporary American poetry, fragment poetics
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 91)
Part 91 is the most tonally varied installment of the 2017 sequence, its range spanning cosmic theology, addiction phenomenology, sexual candor, grief, ecological observation, and epistemological comedy within a single continuous movement. Where earlier installments built sustained pressure around a governing theme — complicity, dying, category — Part 91 moves with something closer to the rhythm of ordinary consciousness on a day when everything is equally present: the sublime and the absurd arriving in the same breath, neither canceling the other. The installment's argument, distributed across its full length, concerns the relationship between perception and its objects — the way seeing, framing, labeling, and narrating transform what they encounter, for better and worse, and the costs of getting this transformation wrong.
The theological stanzas provide the installment's most sustained philosophical thread. "It is impossible for us to exist estranged completely from that of which / we are completely a function — indeed, to say that the divine light reaches / even into hell undersells the point since everything expresses the source" is the sequence's most explicitly pantheist formulation, arguing not merely that God is present everywhere but that the very structure of existence as expression of source makes radical estrangement metaphysically impossible. The statement about eternal torture — "to say that some suffer eternal torture, / even for a finite evil, perhaps is to say / that God is not ultimately successful" — derives a theological conclusion from premises most orthodox believers would accept: if God is omnipotent and ultimately good, then eternal damnation represents a permanent failure of divine purpose. The argument is not atheist but internal to theism, turning doctrinal logic against one of its own most defended positions. "She suffered from excessive religiosity until the cysts / in her temporal lobe, which would have made her / a mystic or a witch at a different time, were excised" places mystical experience in the context of neurology without reducing it — the poem does not say the cysts produced false experience, only that the same neurological condition produces different social identities depending on the historical moment that receives it.
The addiction and depression cluster achieves the installment's most psychologically precise observations. "When the miasma of depression dissipates / you can finally become sad / at things really to be sad about" is among the entire project's most exact formulations of the phenomenology of clinical depression — the way the condition generates its own affective weather that has no necessary relationship to actual circumstances, so that its lifting reveals the genuine emotional landscape that was always there but inaccessible beneath the undifferentiated weight. The addict's partial commitment — "This time at least / don't get as bad as before" — names the specific cognitive negotiation of the person who cannot yet commit to abstinence but can commit to harm reduction, the mind finding the foothold available to it rather than the one the recovery literature prescribes. "After just the first sip, the teen / learns of the possibility to be free / of the anxiety thought normal" closes the installment on one of its most compassionate observations: the first drink's revelation is not corruption but the discovery that the ambient anxiety the teenager had assumed was simply the texture of existence is in fact a condition that can be relieved. That the relief is temporary and the cost compound does not make the initial discovery less real or the teenager less sympathetic.
The sequence's treatment of perception and framing reaches its fullest articulation across several entries that collectively argue that how we see determines what we see in ways we rarely account for. "Conditioned to see nature as endless enmity, / even as cameras cannot help but capture / fox cubs at play and seals sunning on a rock" names the gap between inherited ideological frameworks and direct sensory evidence — the camera, indifferent to the Hobbesian narrative, keeps recording play and ease. "Suggesting, as it does, that any emotional attempt / to convey the horror would fall short of its aim, / the clinical detachment of the depiction evokes it all the more" is the installment's most sophisticated aesthetic observation, identifying the counterintuitive principle by which restraint in representation produces greater affective impact than amplification — the principle that governs much of the mosaic poem's own method. "As if viewers would not know what to feel without it, / and helping to make that true, symphonic music floods / each scene to reinforce emotion already on the screen" applies the same logic inversely, identifying film scoring as a form of emotional colonization that both assumes and produces the audience's dependence on affective instruction.
"The weirdo no longer invited us / to exasperation and revulsion once / we labeled him 'special needs'" is the installment's most compressed observation about how diagnostic categories manage social discomfort — the label functioning not primarily as clinical description but as a mechanism for converting threatening difference into legible, and therefore less disturbing, otherness. The management is for the labelers, not the labeled. This connects to the broader thread about framing's power: "ridiculing one's culture simply by depicting it / in art, as if it were obvious to one's culture / how ridiculous the culture really is" names the specific blindspot of satirical art that assumes its targets will recognize the critique, when in fact the culture being depicted often reads the depiction as celebration.
"The whore was the only one you could be honest with" arrives without context and without irony, and its placement among the installment's other observations about intimacy and disclosure gives it the weight of genuine psychological observation rather than provocation. The commercial relationship, precisely because it is bounded and transactional, creates a space in which the client is released from the performance of self that social relationships require. The honesty is real even if the context that produces it is considered scandalous. This connects to the earlier installment's observation about the sex worker dozing mid-encounter: the poem's treatment of commercial sex is consistently interested in the psychological truths the transaction reveals rather than in moral adjudication of its participants.
"Faced with oblivion (or, more accurately, / subblivion), why not jump into love / with open arms even after heartbreak?" is the installment's most explicitly philosophical address to the reader, and "subblivion" is its most inventive coinage — a state below oblivion, worse than nothingness, the condition of conscious extinction without even the comfort of unconsciousness. Against this prospect the poem proposes love's risk not as naive optimism but as the rational response to genuine existential stakes: if subblivion awaits, the calculus of self-protection against heartbreak looks very different.
"Face studded with rusted hooks (the newest one popping through just under her eye), / it was hard not to see the fish as a war general, and — medal-drunk creatures as we are, / exaggerators and carnival gawkers — it was hard not to place a few more before release" is the installment's most formally elaborated image, and it performs a double self-critique. The fish is observed through the lens of human narrative — the hooks become medals, the fish becomes a general — and the observer, catching himself in the projection, names both the impulse ("medal-drunk creatures as we are") and its irresistibility. But the final detail — "it was hard not to place a few more before release" — implicates the observer in the production of the spectacle he is analyzing. He knows he is a carnival gawker and places the hooks anyway. The self-awareness does not produce the self-correction.
Formally, Part 91 achieves its most comfortable relationship with its own length and variety — the entries feel less like inventory and more like the natural movement of a particular intelligence through a particular day's worth of perception. The comedy is more integrated here than in earlier installments: "sex with the toupee on," "thermostat battles with the spouse," "itches coming when it is inappropriate to scratch" are not relief valves from the sequence's serious work but continuous with it, the same quality of precise attention applied to the minor humiliations of embodied life as to theological argument or racial history. This tonal integration — the refusal to rank the sublime above the bathetic — is the mosaic's deepest formal commitment, and Part 91 is where that commitment feels most fully realized.
Meta Description
The 91st installment of the mosaic poem moves with the rhythm of ordinary consciousness at full range — theological argument, addiction phenomenology, perceptual self-critique, and comic embodiment arriving in continuous sequence, collectively arguing that framing and narration transform their objects in ways the framer rarely accounts for, and that the costs of this blindspot are distributed across every domain of experience from clinical depression to film scoring to the fish one hooks and cannot help but turn into a war general.
Keywords
Made for You and Me, hive Being, mosaic poem, part 91, pantheism poetry, eternal damnation critique, depression phenomenology, addiction harm reduction, temporal lobe mysticism, framing and perception, clinical detachment aesthetics, film scoring critique, diagnostic labeling, subblivion, commercial sex and honesty, fish and projection, tonal integration, contemporary American poetry, 2017 poetry, fragment poetics, aphoristic poetry
Munecas de Trapo (ROUND 1)
This poem, “Muñecas de Trapo,” is a compact study in reciprocity corrupted by moral compromise, showing how generosity within tight-knit masculine economies can return not as gratitude but as temptation. The poem traces a chain of exchange—violence, restitution, reward—until the final “gift” exposes the ethical rot beneath the camaraderie.
The opening lines establish a rough but recognizable code of masculine honor. A tooth is knocked out in a backyard fight, yet the injury is immediately followed by beers and an offer to pay for the dental work. Violence and care are intertwined, governed by a social ethic in which responsibility matters more than innocence. The speaker’s payment is not sentimental but practical: a restoration of balance.
The middle lines deepen this exchange through details of class and migration. “Border grit still caked / into his denim” situates El Flete within a world of physical labor, precarity, and incomplete institutional access. The lack of insurance gives the speaker’s gesture additional weight; the payment becomes a form of solidarity operating outside formal systems.
The poem’s turn comes with the phrase “punishes your good deed / with taboo.” This is the crucial inversion. El Flete responds to generosity through another act of exchange, but one that implicates the speaker morally. The “punishment” lies in being offered something the speaker desires yet recognizes as wrong. The final line’s phrasing—“kids too damn young / to love it this much”—captures the disturbing collision between perceived mutual intensity and ethical prohibition. The danger is precisely that the affection appears real enough to complicate easy moral distance.
The title, “Muñecas de Trapo” (“rag dolls”), reinforces the poem’s concern with vulnerability and objectification. The young girls become part of a transactional economy moving between men, even if emotional attachment clouds the brutality of that fact. The poem’s power comes from refusing to simplify the situation into pure exploitation or pure tenderness. Instead, it examines how care, loyalty, desire, and corruption can become entangled within the same social structure.
Formally, the poem is remarkably compressed. In nine short lines, it moves from violence to fellowship to ethical contamination, revealing how quickly a gesture of decency can draw someone into a compromised world whose rules are already in motion before he arrives.
Meta Description:
A poem exploring how masculine reciprocity and loyalty can curdle into moral compromise, tracing the uneasy overlap between generosity, desire, and taboo.
Keywords:
Muñecas de Trapo, reciprocity, masculinity, taboo, moral compromise, migration, social codes, poetic analysis
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Visit my Substack: Hive Being
Visit my Substack: Hive Being
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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have appeared last night—
all those met along the way?
"An Introduction to Chaos Magic(k)" is a character study of extraordinary density that operates simultaneously as social criticism, psychological portrait, spiritual anatomy, and elegy for a generation caught between the wreckage of postmodernity and the human need for enchantment that postmodernity cannot satisfy. Its unnamed protagonist — the brujita, the cyber witch, the self-styled metaverse malvada — is rendered with a specificity that refuses both the condescending dismissal the author's note acknowledges as a temptation and the uncritical celebration that her own self-mythology demands. The piece holds her in the space between these responses, which is where the most honest literary attention lives.
The mirror is the piece's governing formal and philosophical structure, announced in the recurring lead sentences and sustained throughout as both literal object and conceptual frame. The floor mirror the brujita leans toward, the phone selfie, the floor monitor displaying her avatar, the Tumblr manifestation board, the diary, the SpongeBob hat as relic of reflected childhood — everything in her environment functions as a surface in which she attempts to find a stable self and finds instead proliferating versions, none quite coinciding with the original. "Her reflection, close to touching the original, pulses for her like psilocybin" is the piece's most compressed statement of this condition: the reflection approaches but never achieves coincidence with what it reflects, and the gap between them — that millimeter of irreducible distance — is where the brujita lives. Chaos magic, as the piece understands it, is the attempt to close this gap by force of will — to make the reflection become the original through sufficient intensity of self-declaration.
The piece's most significant formal innovation is its deployment of the alternative-world counterpart. The Hagatess comparison is not merely a sociological contrast between urban digital witchcraft and rural embodied witchcraft, though it is that too. It is a philosophical argument about the relationship between metaphor and materiality. The Maine witch's hedge-crossing is literal before it is metaphorical; the brujita's hedge-crossing is metaphorical before it is — possibly, aspirationally — literal. "To be a custodian of hedges is to be a custodian of in-between spaces" is the piece's most generous formulation of what the brujita is genuinely doing, even within and beneath the curation and the shitposting and the manifesting: she is genuinely inhabiting thresholds, genuinely maintaining the border between meat and pixel, genuinely finding in code a practice that is continuous with the older practice of hedge-witchery even as it is entirely discontinuous from it in every material particular. The piece's intelligence is in granting this continuity without pretending the discontinuity doesn't cost something real.
The rapper tape of self-curation that surrounds the brujita — the IG bio, the CashApp handle, the Depop page, the Redbubble shop, the Tumblr manifestation board, the Only Fans, the Twitch stream, the avatar in Afro-Solarpunk GTA — is not rendered as mere vanity but as a genuine, if displaced, spiritual practice. The piece understands curation as the secular form of the same impulse that fills the brujita's dream satchel with garnet and mugwort: the attempt to shape the environment of the self, to arrange the materials of existence into a configuration that will attract what is desired and repel what is feared. That the materials are now Temu neon lichen and Etsy nymph stickers rather than dried hinojo and foraged knotweed is a difference of platform, not of fundamental human activity. The piece does not excuse the shallowness this sometimes produces. It locates the shallowness within a recognizable human hunger.
The rape sequence — rendered in the staccato blackout structure of traumatic memory, each line a flash cut to black — is the piece's formal and emotional center of gravity, and its placement within the longer narrative arc is precise. The brujita's chaos magic, her manifestation practice, her radical self-sovereignty declarations ("I am the programmer. My decisions, my style, / come from me, not from anything beyond me!") are all, the piece suggests, organized in significant part around this event and its aftermath — the attempt to become the author of a self whose authorship was violated. The diary entry's culminating declaration — "Death, rape, war, divorce, dead-beat dads — / I'm the one who lets them be real or not!" — is simultaneously the piece's most delusional and most sympathetic moment: delusional because the God Mode it claims is unavailable to any human being, sympathetic because the need for it is completely legible given what the preceding flashback sequence has shown. Chaos magic, in this reading, is not primarily superstition but a specific psychological response to the experience of having had one's reality determined by someone else's will. The magic is the attempt to reclaim the position of reality's author.
The mother's whiteness and the father's Blackness organize the brujita's identity in ways the piece renders with careful indirection. The mother — "a true queen but whose whiteness, having grown beyond just 1990s 'uncool' and into 2020s 'problematic,' renders such regality unseen" — is present, capable, genuinely loving, and culturally unmarketable in the brujita's ideological environment. The father — "a deadbeat 'King' who gets off on making store clerks stretch to gather his loosie quarters, bops down the block one cop strangle away from becoming, until at least Disney fashion changes, a city-center statue" — is absent, performatively dignified, and culturally hypervaluable in that same environment. The "$blaxicanbruja" handle navigates this inheritance by claiming the Black and the Mexican and letting the white remain implicit and unacknowledged — a dynamic the piece notes with the quiet observation that she "seemingly identify as part Mexican" while the subtle implication is that she is denying her whiteness. Identity here is not simply chosen but strategically curated, assembled from the culturally available materials in ways that maximize belonging and minimize the liability of the unmarketable.
The anime subreddit sequence is among the piece's most formally brilliant passages — the posts reproduced in their actual idiom, their casual nihilism and identity-grievance and erotic longing forming a kind of found poetry of the platform's affective register. "Shinji Ikari is LITERALLY ME. useless bisexual disasters ✅ daddy issues FOR DAYS ✅ depression naps 24/7 ✅" is simultaneously self-aware and self-regarding, genuinely identifying with a character's psychological complexity and reducing that complexity to an identity checklist. The subreddit is the brujita's social mirror — a space where her specific configuration of pain and humor and political feeling finds community — and the piece renders it without contempt while making visible exactly how the platform's idiom shapes what can be felt and said within it.
The author's note is the piece's most unusual formal element, and its inclusion is a significant artistic decision. The author appears in his own text to describe the process of coming to see the character's humanity — moving from the temptation to dismiss her to the recognition of her innocence, her hard work, her dreams, her potential. The Sagan quotations frame this arc: first the critique (the slide into superstition and darkness), then the corrective (the temperance of criticism with kindness toward those whose culture has not given them all the tools they need). The note does not resolve the tension between these positions; it names it as the piece's governing moral challenge, which is also the reader's. We are invited to hold simultaneously the genuine harm of the brujita's worldview — its solipsism, its victimhood economics, its displacement of real understanding with magical substitutes — and the genuine human being constructing that worldview from the available materials of a specific time, place, and wound. The Hitler quotation is the note's most provocative element, placed alongside the Sagan quotation to suggest that the anti-rational turn has a history that predates Gen Z and has produced consequences far worse than any one young woman's crystal collection.
The diary entry that closes the piece is its most formally distinctive element — the shift to verse within the prose, the "bucking motions of erotic greed" of the handwriting enacted in the erratic spacing and pressure of the lines. "Let my delusions be scarecrows. Let them frighten / any so-called 'reality' seeking to devour my crop: ME." is the brujita at her most genuinely poetic — the image precise, the logic coherent within its own terms, the self-protective function of magical thinking rendered not as pathology but as strategy. The final declaration — "I'm the one who lets them be real or not!" — arrives as both triumph and tragedy: the God Mode claimed, the cost of claiming it left for the reader to feel.
What "An Introduction to Chaos Magic(k)" achieves is a portrait of a specific contemporary formation of the human spirit — wounded, creative, politically confused, genuinely searching, embedded in platforms that shape what can be desired and how desire can be expressed, reaching for enchantment in a world that has systematically dismantled the older structures through which enchantment was transmitted and received, and constructing from the available digital materials something that is simultaneously less and more than what it replaces. The piece does not conclude that the brujita is lost. It concludes that she is navigating, as best she can with what she has, the same territory that humans have always navigated: the gap between the self they are and the self they need to become, with whatever tools their culture and their wound have left them.
Meta Description
A novelistic character study of a young mixed-race Los Angeles woman navigating chaos magic, digital curation, racial identity, sexual trauma, and the human hunger for enchantment in a disenchanted world — rendered through mirrors literal and figurative, the alternative-world counterpart of a Maine hedge witch, a rape sequence in blackout staccato, and a diary entry that culminates in the God Mode declaration of a psyche determined to author its own reality against everything that has authored her instead.
Keywords
An Introduction to Chaos Magic, chaos magic poetry, brujita, blaxican witch, digital witchcraft, manifestation culture, Gen Z identity, racial identity curation, trauma and magical thinking, mirror as form, hedge witch comparison, anime subreddit, Hagatess, alternative world counterpart, rape and self-sovereignty, Carl Sagan Demon-Haunted World, author's note as form, diary as verse, God Mode declaration, contemporary American prose poem, character study, superstition and postmodernity, identity and platform, Los Angeles witch