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 in the absence of expected disaster, we are 
 
left again to what we do not want to be 

left again to: each other—each other’s eyes

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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Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 6/18/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 6/18/26

Fuckbot Errands (ROUND 1)

“Fuckbot Errands” is a miniature poem about aesthetic self-modification under conditions of technological mediation. Its apparent subject is cosmetic contouring, but its deeper concern is the erosion of embodied reality by image culture. The poem asks a deceptively simple question: if a beauty practice already appears uncanny on a screen, what happens when that same aesthetic enters ordinary physical space? Beneath its humor lies a philosophical meditation on simulation, representation, and the increasing inability of contemporary culture to distinguish enhancement from deformation.

The poem begins with startling compression: “Two lines of fecal taupe to chisel / the cheeks of the porky podcaster.” The phrase “fecal taupe” immediately sabotages the glamour of contour makeup. Rather than invoking the language of fashion or beauty, the poem reduces the cosmetic product to an earthy, bodily substance. The choice is strategic. Contouring promises sculptural refinement—the creation of shadows where none naturally exist—but the poem insists on the material absurdity of the process. The face becomes something worked upon, artificially carved into a more desirable shape.

Yet the target is not merely an individual woman. The figure of the “porky podcaster” represents a broader cultural condition. She is someone whose existence is mediated through cameras, screens, and self-presentation. The contour lines are not being applied to a face encountered directly by others. They are being applied to an image-producing machine. This distinction is crucial. The poem is less interested in vanity than in the strange feedback loop whereby people increasingly modify themselves for technological reproduction rather than for face-to-face human perception.

The parenthetical interruption—“(normalized clown / insanity like overdrawn lips, / like Botox)”—broadens the critique. The phrase “normalized clown insanity” is not simply an insult. It names a process by which visibly artificial practices become culturally invisible through repetition. Clowns traditionally exaggerate facial features into caricature. Yet the poem suggests that contemporary beauty culture has rendered analogous exaggerations ordinary. Overdrawn lips and Botox are presented not as isolated phenomena but as examples of a larger aesthetic logic: the pursuit of enhancement until enhancement itself becomes distortion.

Importantly, the poem's criticism is not directed at individuals so much as at collective perception. The key word is “normalized.” The problem is not that people engage in artificial modification. Humans have always done so. The problem is that repeated exposure alters the standards by which reality itself is judged. What once appeared grotesque gradually comes to seem natural.

The poem reaches its philosophical center in the final question: “if these, too stiff / for true shadows, make her / a cadaver even on YouTube, / what must they do hovering / in the aisles of Trader Joes?” The movement from YouTube to Trader Joe’s is essential. It marks a shift from mediated space to physical space. On screen, contouring can succeed because cameras flatten depth and convert faces into images. But the poem asks readers to imagine the same cosmetic construction encountered in ordinary life.

The phrase “too stiff for true shadows” is especially incisive. Contouring attempts to imitate natural shadow, yet the imitation lacks the fluidity of actual light. The cosmetic shadow is static where real shadow is dynamic. It remains fixed despite movement, expression, or changing illumination. The result is a subtle uncanniness. The face begins to resemble not a living body but a representation of one.

This culminates in the image of the “cadaver.” The comparison works because the poem identifies a paradox at the heart of cosmetic enhancement culture. Practices intended to create vitality, youthfulness, and attractiveness can, beyond a certain threshold, produce the opposite effect. The pursuit of animation risks generating lifelessness. The pursuit of beauty risks producing something mask-like.

What gives the poem its force is its economy. In only a handful of lines, it compresses questions of simulation, beauty standards, technological mediation, and collective perception. The humor is sharp, but it serves a larger philosophical purpose. “Fuckbot Errands” ultimately suggests that modern aesthetic culture increasingly asks people to optimize themselves for screens, even when those optimizations become unsettling in the physical world. The poem's final image leaves us with a quietly disturbing possibility: that we have become so accustomed to artificial faces on screens that we no longer notice how strange they appear when encountered among groceries, fluorescent lights, and ordinary human life.

Meta Description

A satirical and philosophical poem about contour makeup, digital self-presentation, beauty culture, simulation, and the uncanny gap between screen-optimized appearance and embodied reality.

Keywords

Fuckbot Errands, beauty culture, contour makeup, cosmetic enhancement, simulation, digital identity, body image, social media aesthetics, Botox culture, uncanny valley, mediated reality, image culture, contemporary poetry, philosophical poetry, satire, embodiment, artificial beauty, screen culture, hyperreality, aesthetic

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 6/10/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 6/10/26

SpongeBob SquarePants (ROUND 1)

"SpongeBob SquarePants" is a poem about the unintended cruelties of conscientious parenting. Its argument is structured as a single grammatical sentence distributed across three tercets, and its central move is an inversion: the cultural product that health-minded parents identify as the risk turns out to be the immunization, and the deprivation they enact in the name of health turns out to be the pathogen. The poem's provocation is not that screens are good for children. It is that the cost of screen abstinence has been catastrophically miscalculated by parents who are operating with an incomplete model of what health requires.

The title does the poem's heaviest conceptual work before the first line begins. "SpongeBob SquarePants" is not merely a reference to a children's cartoon; it names the specific content of what the poem will call "peer currency." The title is the currency itself — the shared cultural knowledge that constitutes social belonging among children, the conversational medium through which friendships are made and tested and sustained. By installing the cartoon's full proper name as the poem's title, the poem insists on a kind of dignity for the content that the health-minded parents deny it. SpongeBob is not noise or waste. It is a social environment, a lexicon, a form of literacy — the one that matters most in the only economy children actually inhabit.

"Peer currency" is the poem's most compressed and generative coinage. It frames cultural knowledge as economic capital: what you need to trade in the social market of childhood, the medium of exchange without which you are not simply poor but unable to participate in the transaction at all. The screen-deprived child is not merely missing entertainment; they are missing the means of exchange. They arrive at the social economy bankrupt in the only denomination accepted. The word "currency" also implies that this knowledge circulates, that it has value only in relation to other holders, that its power is collective rather than intrinsic. You cannot spend peer currency alone.

The parenthetical embedded in the middle tercet — "(just a few Shakespeare plays / short of retarded)" — is the poem's most explosive formal and semantic device. It operates on several registers simultaneously. First, it deploys the familiar idiom-type ("a few sandwiches short of a picnic") to name the social perception visited upon the screen-deprived child by their peers. Second, it invokes "retarded" not as the speaker's diagnostic term but as the social verdict delivered by the peer group — the word that circulates among children, with its full derogatory charge, to name those who cannot function in the shared cultural currency. Third, and most precisely, it activates the word's clinical etymology: to retard means to delay, to hold back. These children are genuinely delayed — held back from the peer culture that constitutes their developmental environment — by the very intervention meant to advance them. The word thus enacts its own double meaning. But the parenthetical's deepest irony operates through its content: Shakespeare. The implied alternative to SpongeBob — the high-cultural program that health-minded parents would substitute — is precisely what marks these children as deficient in peer terms. The more Shakespeare, the less SpongeBob, and the more the child appears intellectually and socially disabled to the only judges whose verdict matters to them. High culture, in the social economy of childhood, is not capital but liability.

"Health-minded parents" is perhaps the poem's most carefully calibrated phrase. It does not say negligent parents, or ignorant parents, or cruel parents. It says health-minded — parents who have thought carefully about their children's wellbeing, consulted the literature, made deliberate choices in the name of long-term flourishing. The poem does not dispute their intentions. It disputes their model of health — specifically, its incompleteness. "Neglecting loneliness's impact / on longevity" invokes a now-substantial body of research establishing social isolation as a major determinant of lifespan, comparable in effect to smoking. The health-minded parent who restricts screen time to reduce one category of risk has failed to account for the greater risk of social exclusion. The irony is structural, not personal: a health framework that omits loneliness is not a health framework but a partial one, and partial health frameworks produce the harms they omit to calculate.

"Our ecosystem of endless screens" is where the poem's "our" becomes significant. The speaker does not stand outside the screen culture in judgment; the first-person plural implicates them — and the reader — in the ecosystem being described. "Ecosystem" is the poem's other major coinage. It naturalizes the screen environment: not a product, not a pollution, not an entertainment industry, but a habitat with its own logic, inhabitants, interdependencies, and survival requirements. To resist an ecosystem is not to make a consumer choice but to refuse a biome. The children whose parents make this refusal on their behalf are not protected from the ecosystem; they are simply excluded from it, which in biological terms is not safety but exposure of a different kind.

Formally, the poem's single-sentence architecture performs its argumentative logic. The sentence cannot be abandoned mid-clause; it must be followed through to its completion, just as the causal chain it describes — from health-minded resistance to social crippling — must be followed through to its conclusion. The two dashes create the sentence's two major suspensions: "crippled—" opens a wound that the subsequent clauses fill; "retarded)—" completes the social verdict before pivoting to causality. "Because" is the poem's hinge, and its position — straddling the second and third tercets — marks the structural center of the argument. The poem does not merely observe; it explains, and the explanation lands, in the final line, on "screens" — the word against which the entire health-minded apparatus had been organized, returned now as the term of the culture the children have been denied.

In the context of the broader project, the poem extends the work's sustained interest in the unintended pathologies of wellness culture — the same interest that drives "Endgame Wegovy" and the fat-praise stanzas of the mosaic. There, pharmaceutical capital waits for health culture to exhaust itself; here, health culture exhausts its children directly. The poem does not argue against health. It argues against health frameworks that mistake the absence of one risk for the presence of wellbeing — frameworks that, in their vigilance against the visible danger, produce the invisible one at scale.

Meta Description

A poem about the social cost of screen restriction — arguing that children denied access to the peer currency of shared screen culture are rendered permanently socially deficient by health-minded parents who, in calculating one category of risk, neglect the loneliness research that makes social exclusion the greater threat to longevity.

Keywords

SpongeBob SquarePants poem, peer currency, screen time parenting, childhood social exclusion, loneliness and longevity, health-minded parenting critique, wellness culture poetry, contemporary American poetry, unintended consequences parenting, screen ecosystem, aphoristic poetry, cultural capital children, social isolation health, single-sentence poem, contemporary satire parenting

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 6/9/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 6/9/26

Salome (ROUND 1)

“Salome” is a story about desire after desire, theft after ownership, and mortality after ambition. Set in the year 2079, it presents an elderly writer confined to a nursing home, watching a young aide gradually work up the courage to steal a bottle of perfume from what remains of his once-vast collection. Yet the theft is merely the narrative occasion for a far more expansive meditation on aging, memory, determinism, eros, and the strange persistence of selfhood after the structures that once sustained it have largely disappeared. The story asks a deceptively simple question: what remains of a person when desire has not entirely vanished but has ceased to matter?

The opening immediately situates the reader within a landscape of loss. The narrator watches “the aide in her residential pink,” while the five surviving bottles of perfume sit on a nursing-home nightstand, “the place whose faroff dread feels too like yesterday.” The phrase collapses decades into an instant. Old age is not presented as a distant destination finally reached but as a condition that seems to have arrived almost immediately. Time itself has undergone compression. This effect is reinforced by the detail that the narrator's son, once a child listening to Minecraft songs in the car, is now himself elderly. The story repeatedly emphasizes that entire lifetimes can appear, from the vantage of extreme age, as little more than brief interruptions.

Memory occupies a central place in this temporal collapse. Significantly, the memories that endure are not grand accomplishments but fragments of cultural debris: advertising jingles, children's songs, stray lyrics. The Minecraft refrain, “Don’t mine at night!,” loops endlessly in the narrator's mind, while old commercial songs survive with equal tenacity. These memories are described as being “more resistant to submersion than ever,” suggesting that consciousness in old age becomes less a curated archive than a field in which certain recurring fragments stubbornly refuse extinction. The image of “squirrels scrabbling up the sides of a drown bucket” brilliantly captures this phenomenon. Memory is no longer governed by deliberate recollection but by involuntary persistence.

Against this backdrop enters the aide and, with her, the story's central symbolic object: perfume. The young woman repeatedly returns to smell the narrator's bottles, eventually lingering over Salome. Perfume functions throughout the story as a material repository of desire and history. Unlike photographs or written documents, fragrances preserve emotional worlds through sensory association. Salome is not merely a scent but a condensed philosophy of human nature. The narrator describes it as “orange blossom and jasmine, castoreum and hyraceum, cumin and musk,” a composition that leads human beings back toward “the indolic petals, the pissy and fecal muff, out of which we used to come.” The language is deliberately provocative, yet its function is philosophical rather than merely transgressive. The fragrance becomes an emblem of continuity between civilization and animality, refinement and bodily origin.

This concern with humanity's animal foundations recurs throughout the story. The aide is described as looking around “like the chimp no neural implant could have stopped us from being.” The observation is characteristic of the narrator's worldview. Technological advancement has transformed society, yet beneath these transformations human beings remain fundamentally continuous with their evolutionary inheritance. The aide's temptation to steal, her furtive glances, her attraction to the perfume—all are interpreted not as moral failings but as expressions of an underlying biological condition.

Indeed, one of the story's most striking features is its sustained critique of shame. The narrator explicitly reflects that “the hackles of conscience need not involve any shame” and that “shame is not the only fuel for improvement.” These reflections reveal a philosophical position developed over an entire lifetime. The narrator views shame as an unnecessary and often destructive mechanism of social regulation. What matters is not whether individuals experience shame but whether they understand themselves. The aide's impending theft becomes a test case for this conviction. He recognizes exactly what she is doing and yet feels little desire to expose or punish her.

The story's treatment of free will deepens this philosophical framework. The narrator asks, “what warrant, besides, could shame ever have when, as any child could see, nothing—no thought, no action, no desire—is ultimately up to any of us?” This statement is not incidental. It functions as one of the story's governing propositions. The narrator's response to the theft emerges directly from his deterministic worldview. If human actions arise from forces beyond individual control, then condemnation becomes increasingly difficult to justify. The aide's theft is simply another event unfolding within a chain of causation.

Yet the story refuses to portray the narrator as a detached sage who has transcended desire. One of its greatest achievements is its insistence that philosophical conviction does not eliminate erotic impulse. The narrator continues to notice the aide's attractiveness. He continues to think in sexual terms. He even entertains the fantasy of leveraging his knowledge of the theft into a sexual encounter. Significantly, however, the story treats these thoughts neither as intentions nor as moral revelations. They are presented as mental events arising unbidden within consciousness. “Thoughts come unbidden,” the narrator observes, a statement that directly echoes his broader determinism. Desire persists not because he chooses it but because it remains embedded within him.

The relationship between desire and age forms the emotional center of the story. Earlier in life, the narrator apparently wielded considerable charisma. The aide has “no idea how many girls like her you have sucked into a bucking hunger.” The phrasing suggests a man who once possessed significant erotic power and who remains fully aware of that history. Yet the remarkable feature of the story is that this awareness is no longer accompanied by urgency. The old desires survive, but they have become curiously weightless. The narrator can imagine seduction without needing to pursue it. Fantasy remains while appetite's imperative has weakened.

This transformation is embodied most powerfully in the perfume bottle itself. Salome once belonged to the narrator's wife. It represents not only sensuality but marriage, memory, and mortality. The bottle's theft therefore carries emotional significance beyond its monetary value. Yet even here the narrator's response is characterized by relinquishment rather than possession. “What good is the bottle anymore to you?” he asks himself. The question extends beyond the perfume. What good are ownership, status, achievement, conquest, or even memory when life approaches its conclusion?

The exchange involving the rap lyric crystallizes this tension. When the narrator whispers, “I try to tell these young niggas crime don’t pay,” he simultaneously acknowledges the theft and transforms it into a joke. The line functions as a final act of participation in the social world. It is a tiny graffiti tag of consciousness, an assertion that he still sees and understands what is happening. Yet the gesture lacks punitive force. The narrator does not seek justice. He merely wishes to mark his presence.

This concern with presence is visible throughout the story. The narrator compares the lyric to his youthful graffiti: “I was here.” That phrase may ultimately provide the key to the entire narrative. The perfume collection, the books he has written, the memories of his son, the lingering desires, and even the cryptic warning to the aide all represent attempts to leave traces. Yet the story simultaneously recognizes the futility of such traces. Most will disappear. The collection will be sold. The books may be forgotten. Even the warning itself is likely to be dismissed as senile babble.

The story's final question—“But what does it matter?”—therefore arrives not as despair but as philosophical culmination. It does not negate meaning. Rather, it places meaning within a larger horizon where possession, shame, desire, and legacy have all begun to lose their urgency. The narrator remains recognizably himself until the end: observant, lustful, intellectual, mischievous, and self-aware. Yet these traits now exist within a consciousness increasingly detached from the need to act upon them.

“Salome” is ultimately a meditation on the strange coexistence of persistence and release. The self remains. Desire remains. Memory remains. Yet the compulsive force that once animated them has begun to dissolve. What emerges is not wisdom in any conventional sense but a state of radical relinquishment, where even theft, erotic longing, and mortality are absorbed into a broader acceptance of the human condition. The story's achievement lies in its ability to hold these tensions simultaneously, creating a portrait of old age that is neither sentimental nor tragic but profoundly philosophical.

Meta Description

A philosophical story about aging, perfume, memory, determinism, erotic persistence, and the gradual relinquishment of ownership, shame, and desire in the face of mortality.

Keywords

Salome, aging and desire, perfume literature, determinism, free will skepticism, mortality, memory and identity, old age fiction, nursing home narrative, eros and aging, philosophical fiction, inheritance, relinquishment, shame theory, animality, contemporary literary fiction, sensory memory, existential literature, perfume collection, end-of-life consciousness.

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 6/8/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 6/8/26

Mr. Haldol (ROUND 1)

“Mr. Haldol” is a poem about the public performance of stability after private psychic rupture, and the uneasy re-entry of a medically stabilized subject into an institutional role that depends on the appearance of coherence. The poem’s drama is not primarily narrative but social and phenomenological: it examines what it feels like to be known, implicitly or explicitly, as someone who has “come / fresh from the nuthouse,” while nevertheless being required to enact the rituals of professional normalcy.

The opening stanza immediately establishes this doubled condition of presence and performance:

“There you stand one Monday / morning, greeting students / with a banker’s handshake”

The “banker’s handshake” is not merely descriptive but symbolic. It compresses an entire regime of institutional legitimacy into a bodily gesture: firmness, predictability, controlled affect, and social trustworthiness. Yet the phrase is immediately strained by the situation it inhabits. The speaker is not simply a teacher resuming work; he is a subject whose continuity has been interrupted by psychiatric hospitalization. The handshake thus becomes less a natural extension of self than a rehearsed mechanism for re-entering social intelligibility.

The poem complicates this performance further by situating it temporally within a fragile threshold state:

“at the door after weeks of subs—”

The reference to substitutes (“subs”) signals institutional substitution and administrative continuity in the speaker’s absence. While the school functioned without him, his identity as teacher was temporarily delegated. His return is therefore not restoration but reinstatement under conditions of partial dislocation. The phrase also subtly suggests substitution in a psychological sense: the self that returns is not fully continuous with the self that left.

This instability becomes more explicit in the next movement:

“bushy-tailed but, for these / first minutes, reining in / that jazz they loved”

Here, “bushy-tailed” invokes forced brightness, a performative vitality that sits uneasily alongside the speaker’s recent hospitalization. The phrase suggests that liveliness itself is now something regulated rather than spontaneous. More significant is the phrase “reining in / that jazz they loved.” “Jazz” functions as a metaphor for erratic affect, improvisational personality, and uncontrolled expressive excess. It is “loved” by the institutional environment precisely because it is entertaining, recognizable, and socially consumable, yet it must also be contained in order for the speaker to remain legible as authority.

The verb “reining” is especially important. It implies that this containment is not only externally imposed but internally enacted. The speaker is simultaneously subject and agent of his own modulation, both performer and regulator of his performance.

The final stanza removes any ambiguity about the social frame in which this performance occurs:

“the whole / school knows you have come / fresh from the nuthouse.”

The bluntness of “nuthouse” is decisive. It strips away clinical euphemism and replaces it with communal vernacular knowledge. The speaker’s condition is not hidden or delicately coded; it is socially legible and publicly acknowledged. Yet the phrase also registers the violence of that legibility. “Fresh” intensifies the immediacy of exposure, suggesting not merely past hospitalization but a return still marked by its proximity to institutional psychiatric containment.

What the poem stages, therefore, is not simply stigma but the paradox of reintegration. The speaker is simultaneously expected to perform normalcy and already marked as having failed it. The institutional space of the school becomes a site where coherence must be enacted precisely because coherence is known to be fragile.

At a deeper level, the poem also explores the tension between identity as internal continuity and identity as external recognition. The speaker’s sense of self is not presented as stable interior essence but as something continuously negotiated at the interface of social perception. The handshake, the reining in of affect, and the communal awareness of psychiatric history all converge to produce a subject who exists primarily as managed visibility.

In this sense, “Mr. Haldol” is less a poem about illness than about the conditions under which personhood is publicly maintained after its disruption. It asks what remains of authority, professionalism, and selfhood when those categories are shadowed by the knowledge of breakdown, and it locates its answer not in resolution but in ongoing performance under constraint.

Meta Description

A poem exploring institutional reintegration after psychiatric hospitalization, the performance of professional identity, stigma, and the fragile maintenance of social coherence.

Keywords

psychiatric hospitalization, institutional identity, stigma, teacher narrative, mental health poetry, performance of normalcy, social recognition, subjectivity, workplace reintegration, affect regulation, contemporary poetry analysis, psychiatric recovery, institutional authority, identity and rupture, phenomenological poetics

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 6/3/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 6/3/26

Sucia (ROUND 2)

“Sucia” is a poem about the psychic redistribution of contamination. While its immediate subject is incestuous abuse, the poem's deeper concern is the interpretive crisis that follows revelation: how a family system metabolizes an atrocity that threatens to destroy its organizing fictions. The poem is not interested in the perpetrator's psychology except insofar as it succeeds. Its focus falls instead upon a mother confronted with evidence so devastating that ordinary moral perception begins to buckle under the pressure. The result is a lyric of projection, displacement, and contaminated judgment in which the victim becomes burdened with the very stain that should belong to the abuser.

The title announces this concern before the poem even begins. “Sucia”—dirty, filthy, unclean—functions as both accusation and diagnosis. Yet the poem never specifies who is sucia. The daughter? The mother? The man? The household itself? This ambiguity is essential. Incest collapses ordinary boundaries of contamination. Dirt ceases to be a property of a single individual and instead becomes a psychic substance circulating through the family system. The title therefore hovers over the poem like a curse whose target remains unstable.

The opening lines establish this instability immediately:

After learning that your hombre
has reamed every socket
of your preteen into an agent

The phrase “into an agent” is the poem's conceptual center. The daughter is not merely abused; she is transformed within the mother's imagination. “Agent” is a term saturated with implications of intentionality, desire, and responsibility. Yet the word appears alongside “preteen,” producing a collision the poem refuses to resolve. The tension is immediate and unbearable. A preteen cannot meaningfully occupy the role implied by “agent” within the sexual economy being described. The very absurdity of the attribution exposes the defensive mechanism generating it.

Importantly, the daughter has not become an agent. She has been made into one. The grammar matters. The mother's perception has undergone a mutation. Faced with an intolerable reality, she unconsciously reconstructs the victim as participant. The poem thus dramatizes one of trauma's most devastating secondary injuries: not merely violation, but reinterpretation.

The phrase “reamed every socket” contributes to this process of symbolic deformation. “Socket” is a deliberately mechanical word. It reduces the body to openings and functions, stripping away individuality. The daughter's subjectivity disappears beneath the language used to describe what has happened to her. Yet the reduction is not merely descriptive. It reflects the logic of abuse itself. The body becomes fragmented into sites of use. The daughter's humanity is attacked first through violation and then through the explanatory framework imposed afterward.

The next lines complete the transformation:

ravenous and scheming

The choice of adjectives is remarkable. Both imply appetite and strategy. Both belong to the vocabulary of seduction rather than victimization. Applied to a preteen, they become grotesque. The poem's achievement lies in forcing the reader to inhabit this grotesquerie without endorsing it. The daughter is being imagined through categories fundamentally incapable of describing her situation. The resulting distortion reveals more about the psychological needs of the adults than about the child herself.

Psychoanalytically, the mechanism is recognizable. The mother's discovery confronts her with multiple unbearable truths simultaneously. The man she trusted has committed a monstrous act. Her daughter has suffered under her protection. Her judgment has failed. Her domestic reality has proven false. Such realizations threaten not merely emotional equilibrium but identity itself. Under such conditions, projection becomes attractive because it redistributes intolerable guilt. If the child can be imagined as possessing agency, then responsibility can be diluted. The asymmetry between predator and victim becomes less absolute.

The poem's central question emerges from this defensive landscape:

what
was worse: you beating her
(“¡Puta!”) or letting him, cock

The brilliance of this formulation lies in its refusal of simple moral sequencing. One form of violence is physical and immediate. The other is interpretive and enduring. The poem asks whether the slap or the story constitutes the deeper injury.

“¡Puta!” is particularly devastating because it represents the endpoint of the daughter's symbolic transformation. She is no longer perceived as a child. She has been relocated into an adult sexual category. The slur accomplishes in a single word what the preceding lines anatomize more gradually. It imposes sexual culpability upon someone who cannot meaningfully bear it.

Yet the poem does not stop there. The alternative possibility—“or letting him”—shifts attention away from overt violence and toward complicity. The mother may strike her daughter in a moment of rage, but what happens when she adopts his interpretation of events? What happens when she permits his narrative to reorganize reality itself?

The image that follows is among the poem's most horrifying:

cock
still tasting of her

The line eliminates all distance between act and aftermath. The abuse is not a distant memory. It remains materially present. The man appears carrying evidence of what has occurred upon his own body. The grotesque intimacy of the image performs an important function. It prevents abstraction. The mother's acceptance of his story cannot be attributed to ignorance. The poem insists upon proximity. She chooses belief in the immediate shadow of undeniable violation.

This proximity intensifies the poem's psychological inquiry. The question becomes not whether evidence is available but whether evidence is sufficient. The poem suggests that under conditions of extreme psychic threat, interpretation follows emotional necessity rather than empirical fact. Belief becomes a survival mechanism.

The phrase “swallowing it all” deepens this insight. On the most obvious level, it refers to accepting his explanation. Yet the line's placement after the image of his body generates additional meanings. The mother does not simply swallow a story. She swallows an entire framework of understanding. She internalizes the logic required to preserve a world that would otherwise collapse.

The final lines reveal the consequence:

that it would be
cruel to kick her out?

This may be the poem's most disturbing inversion. “Cruel” is ordinarily reserved for acts committed against the vulnerable. Here, however, cruelty has been redefined. The daughter has become the apparent source of disruption. The victim has become the problem requiring management.

The line exposes how thoroughly moral language can be commandeered by psychic defense. The vocabulary of care becomes indistinguishable from the vocabulary of abandonment. Expulsion can now masquerade as compassion. The daughter's removal appears not as punishment but as a regrettable necessity.

The poem's final question mark is crucial. It prevents closure. The speaker does not adjudicate between the mother's violence and her complicity. Instead, the reader is left confronting a system in which both emerge from the same poisoned source. The beating and the believing are not separate phenomena. They are different expressions of a single interpretive catastrophe.

Formally, “Sucia” derives much of its force from compression. The poem contains no exposition, no backstory, and no psychological explanation. It proceeds through concentrated fragments that require the reader to reconstruct an entire familial drama from a handful of details. This compression mirrors the structure of traumatic knowledge itself. Vast realities become condensed into a few unforgettable images.

The diction contributes significantly to this effect. The coexistence of English and Spanish creates a domestic intimacy resistant to sociological distance. “Hombre” and “¡Puta!” do not function as decorative markers of ethnicity. They feel spoken, inherited, lived. They belong to the emotional architecture of the scene itself.

What ultimately makes “Sucia” so disturbing is its refusal to locate incest solely within the act of abuse. The poem suggests that violation continues through interpretation. The predator's most enduring victory lies not merely in harming the child but in successfully relocating shame onto her. The abuse becomes a mechanism for rewriting perception itself. The daughter suffers not only because she was violated but because she is made to occupy the symbolic position of violator.

The poem therefore concerns a form of violence that is simultaneously sexual, familial, and hermeneutic. It is about what happens when a child's innocence becomes incompatible with the psychic survival of the adults around her. Faced with that incompatibility, the family does not merely fail to recognize the truth. It manufactures a substitute truth capable of preserving itself. “Sucia” inhabits the moment of that manufacture with extraordinary economy and ferocity.

Meta Description

A lyric examining incest, maternal complicity, projected guilt, victim-blaming, and the psychic redistribution of shame through which an abused child becomes recast as sexually culpable within a damaged family system.

Keywords

Sucia, incest trauma, victim-blaming, psychoanalytic criticism, projective identification, family systems, maternal complicity, contamination, shame displacement, traumatic interpretation, incest literature, hermeneutic violence, sexual abuse, moral inversion, family pathology, symbolic guilt, trauma poetics, contemporary poetry, psychic defense mechanisms, violence and meaning

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 5/7/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 5/7/26

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

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 4/26/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 4/26/26

BIPOC Stockholm Syndrome (ROUND 1)

This piece, “BIPOC Stockholm Syndrome,” is a work of full-force satirical inversion whose argument only becomes clear when its most extreme claim is taken seriously as deliberately absurd. The essay adopts the strongest possible version of a familiar denunciation—America as a white-supremacist hellscape—and then explains, with equal intensity, why people nonetheless risk everything to get in and stay. The “answer” it offers—that migrants are effectively hypnotized into loving their own oppression—is not the conclusion to believe, but the pressure point of the satire.

The structure is methodical. First, the piece builds a dense record of suffering and endurance: border crossings marked by injury, dehydration, exploitation; life inside marked by improvisation, vigilance, informal economies, and constant risk management. These passages are concrete and grounded. They establish that the stakes are real and severe.

Then comes the pivot. Instead of moderating the initial condemnation, the essay doubles down: if this country is truly the epicenter of racial hostility, then the behavior just described—massive, repeated, self-endangering movement toward it, followed by tenacious efforts to remain—becomes difficult to reconcile. Rather than resolving that tension in a straightforward way, the piece pushes into exaggeration: the migrants must be under a kind of ideological spell, a “Stockholm syndrome,” chasing what harms them.

That conclusion is the satire’s core device. It is too extreme to hold, and that is precisely the point. By presenting such an implausible explanation, the essay forces the reader to look back at the premises that made it necessary. If one rejects the hypnosis explanation—and the piece expects you to—then something has to give. Either the characterization of the country as a totalizing racial trap is overstated, or the motivations of migrants are being misunderstood, or both. The satire works by cornering the reader into that reconsideration.

The final movement sharpens the target. It highlights a tension in public discourse: condemning a system in absolute terms while simultaneously demanding access to it and defending the right to remain within it. The essay does not gently parse this tension; it amplifies it until it becomes impossible to ignore. The rhetorical excess—both in the depiction of harm and in the “hypnosis” explanation—is what makes the contradiction visible.

What emerges, then, is not a literal claim about migrants or hypnosis, but an indirect argument about framing. The persistent attraction of the United States, even under hardship, is treated as evidence that the reality is more complex than a one-note depiction of systemic hostility. The satire refuses to say this plainly. Instead, it constructs a scenario in which the only way to maintain the harshest possible condemnation is to accept an obviously untenable explanation for human behavior.

In that sense, the piece argues by reductio through exaggeration. It takes a dominant narrative at face value, follows it to an absurd conclusion, and leaves the reader to recognize that the starting point cannot be as simple as it is often presented.

Meta Description:
A satirical essay that uses an exaggerated “Stockholm syndrome” premise to expose tensions between claims of systemic racism and the persistent attraction of the United States for undocumented migrants.

Keywords:
immigration satire, reductio ad absurdum, rhetorical inversion, migrant behavior, systemic racism debate, discourse critique

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 4/23/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 4/23/26

An Organic Ramiro d’Orco (ROUND 1)

This piece, “An Organic Ramiro d’Orco,” stages a voice that is not merely angry but convinced it is one of the last holdouts of clarity in a landscape it experiences as saturated with coercion, performance, and bad faith. Its power comes from how tightly it fuses that conviction to a Machiavellian frame: the fantasy of a Prince who does not argue within the system but lets the system’s own contradictions ripen into collapse.

The title’s invocation of Ramiro d’Orco—filtered through The Prince—is key. In Machiavelli, Ramiro is both instrument and spectacle: the one who does the necessary violence and is then discarded to restore order. Calling him “organic” here suggests that no single agent needs to be installed. The conditions themselves—ideological overreach, coalition strain, institutional incentives—will generate their own corrective. The Prince’s genius lies in restraint: not intervening too early, not dissipating the force of contradiction, allowing excess to complete its arc.

What gives the monologue its charge is that it is not free-floating invention. It is built from recognitions that, for many readers, feel concrete: reputational risk for dissent; the bundling of positions into all-or-nothing packages; the sense that some institutions reward amplification of certain narratives; the suspicion that moral language can become performative or strategic. The voice treats these not as debatable claims but as settled facts, and from there it accelerates.

That acceleration is the piece’s central device. Grievances aggregate into a total picture; exceptions are absorbed; opposition becomes proof of the system’s reach. The rhetoric does not pause to sort degrees or cases. Instead, it aims for saturation—an atmosphere in which everything is already implicated. This is where the Machiavellian strand and the emotional register lock together: if the field is as captured as the speaker believes, then argument is futile and time becomes the lever. Let things overextend. Let alliances reveal their internal limits. Let consequences arrive without interference.

The middle movement, in which the Prince declines to “lift a finger,” turns that idea into method. Nonintervention is framed not as passivity but as control at a higher level: a wager that certain combinations of commitments cannot hold under pressure. Whether one shares that wager or not, it is a recognizable strategic intuition—one that recurs in political theory whenever coalitions are thought to be incoherent at the level of first principles but stable at the level of short-term incentives.

The final turn completes the circle: after the burn, the Prince returns as restorer. This is not simply triumphalism; it is the imagined resolution of the opening problem. The same voice that rejects the prevailing order also claims the authority to recover what was “good” within it—civil liberties, personal freedoms—once the excesses have been exhausted. The structure is cyclical: permissiveness → overreach → correction → restoration. In that sense, the piece is less a linear argument than a political cosmology, a story about how imbalance corrects itself.

As satire, the text works by immersing the reader in that voice without relief. It does not step aside to signal where critique ends and caricature begins; the pressure is continuous. That has two effects. First, it preserves the immediacy of the underlying concerns, refusing to dilute them into polite summary. Second, it exposes how quickly a claim of standing for “real truth and justice” can expand into a totalizing frame that leaves little room for distinction. The reader is made to inhabit both the pull of the argument and the cost of its escalation.

What emerges is a study of how political anger organizes itself when it no longer trusts existing arbiters. Strategy replaces deliberation; inevitability replaces contingency; opponents become elements in a system rather than interlocutors. The Prince, in this sense, is less a person than a posture: patience armed with certainty, waiting for contradiction to do its work.

Meta Description:
A satirical prose piece using a Machiavellian frame to depict how political rage, distrust of institutions, and coalition contradictions escalate into a vision of self-consuming excess and eventual restoration.

Keywords:
political satire, Machiavelli, Ramiro d’Orco, coalition dynamics, institutional distrust, rhetoric of rage, inevitability, strategy, discourse analysis

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 4/22/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 4/22/26

Sinners Portion of "Hypocorism" (ROUND 2)

Let’s workshop this portion of a story about an adult-minor romance I have been working hard on behind the scenes over the last months--this portion being relevant given the Oscar success of Sinners.

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 4/20/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 4/20/26

The Bad Seed (ROUND 1)

This piece, “The Bad Seed,” is a first-person prose narrative that stages a deeply disturbing account of projection, culpability, and the collapse of moral responsibility under the pressure of desire. At its core, the text is not an argument about evil in any metaphysical sense, despite its language, but a study in how a narrator constructs a framework—demonic possession, innate malevolence, metaphysical “bad seed” ontology—to displace, rationalize, and yet paradoxically intensify his own guilt.

The opening establishes the governing conceit: the child is “a demon.” This claim is immediately framed as something that might sound “odd,” but the narrator insists it would be confirmed by anyone in his position. This rhetorical move is important. It anticipates disbelief while attempting to preempt it by appealing to hypothetical shared experience. The narrative voice is thus defensive from the outset, already aware that its interpretation requires justification beyond ordinary moral reasoning.

What follows is a gradual construction of projection as ontology. The girl’s behavior—minor boundary-testing, suggestive tone, ambiguous gestures—is interpreted not as developmental or situational but as evidence of an underlying, pre-existing essence. The narrator explicitly rejects environmental or causal explanations, invoking philosophical frameworks (Leibniz, Spinoza, overdetermination) to argue that any account of her behavior must either parallel, redescribe, or redundantly accompany what she “already is.” This is a crucial move: by denying causation, he elevates his perception into metaphysical certainty. The girl is not made this way; she simply is this way.

Yet this metaphysical inflation coexists with a contradictory awareness of responsibility. The narrator repeatedly acknowledges that “I was to blame,” insisting that naming her nature does not absolve him. This creates a tension central to the piece: simultaneous displacement and self-indictment. He constructs an external source of corruption while also recognizing his own agency. Rather than resolving this tension, the text sustains it, allowing the two positions to reinforce one another. The more he frames her as demonic, the more intense his own participation appears; the more he admits his role, the more he seeks an explanation that exceeds ordinary culpability.

The middle sections elaborate a logic of complicity and equivalence. The narrator describes an eerie sense of mutual recognition—“as if we were… in league”—collapsing the asymmetry between adult and child into a fantasy of shared damnation. This is one of the most revealing aspects of the text. By imagining the relationship as one of equals, he erases the very power imbalance that defines the situation. The language of “two damned souls” functions not only as metaphor but as a mechanism for moral leveling.

The narrative’s escalation is structured through everyday interactions—basketball, casual physical contact, domestic intimacy—that are retrospectively reinterpreted as signs of deeper corruption. This retrospective framing is key. Events that might otherwise be read as mundane or ambiguous are re-coded as evidence once the narrator has committed to his explanatory framework. The past is rewritten to support the present interpretation.

The climactic scene foregrounds the narrator’s failure of intervention. He describes himself as “faking sleep,” a phrase that encapsulates the central ethical failure: the refusal to act under the guise of passivity. This is not ignorance or unconsciousness but deliberate non-resistance. The text is explicit that his physiological response contradicts any claim to innocence. The body, in this sense, becomes evidence against the narrative of victimization.

Importantly, the narrator does not fully exculpate himself. He acknowledges that “the source of my behavior was internal,” rejecting a complete transfer of blame. However, this acknowledgment is immediately reabsorbed into the larger framework of shared corruption and “jouissance.” The language of mutual activation—of being drawn into a pre-existing circuit of evil—allows him to maintain both guilt and justification simultaneously.

The closing sections intensify this dynamic by emphasizing instruction and transmission. The girl’s role shifts from instigator to guide, directing actions and shaping the involvement of others. This further reinforces the narrator’s constructed ontology while deepening the sense of collective participation. Yet even here, the text underscores that his compliance is voluntary, sustained by desire rather than coercion.

What emerges, then, is not a coherent theory of evil but a portrait of cognitive and moral distortion under extreme conditions. The narrator’s invocation of demonic essence, philosophical determinism, and shared damnation functions as a set of explanatory tools that both reveal and obscure his agency. The piece is unsettling precisely because it does not resolve these contradictions. It leaves the reader with a layered account in which acknowledgment of guilt coexists with elaborate mechanisms of displacement.

In this way, “The Bad Seed” operates as a study in how individuals narrate their own transgression. It shows how language, theory, and metaphor can be mobilized to make sense of actions that resist straightforward explanation, and how those same tools can distort responsibility even as they attempt to confront it.

Meta Description:
A disturbing psychological narrative examining projection, complicity, and moral distortion, exploring how a narrator constructs metaphysical explanations to grapple with his own culpability.

Keywords:
The Bad Seed, psychological narrative, projection, moral responsibility, complicity, unreliable narrator, philosophical justification, guilt, distortion

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 4/6/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 4/6/26

Golden Hour Portion of "Hypocorism" (ROUND 2)

This “Golden Hour” portion of “Hypocorism” is a richly layered prose passage about expectancy, perception, pedagogy, erotic intimacy, and emotional dependency, all unfolding within the tight frame of a late-afternoon school pickup. What gives the piece its particular force is the way it refuses to segregate these registers. The speaker’s aesthetic sensitivity, his political and pedagogical agitation, his sexual bond with the girl, and his quasi-parental tenderness all occupy the same continuous field. The result is not simply a scene of conversation followed by arousal, but a portrait of relational totalization in which every mode of attention intensifies every other.

The opening pages establish this totalization through waiting. Parked outside the school’s service entrance, the speaker watches the loading-dock margins of the building with a concentration so heightened that even refuse, pallets, crates, and municipal dumpsters acquire painterly dignity. This is not decorative scene-setting. The point is that desire alters phenomenology. Because he is waiting for her, the world becomes newly saturated: ugly logistics glow with artistic possibility, and the changing evening light turns an industrial school backside into something nearly sublime. The passage thereby links eros to perceptual intensification. He does not merely long for her; his longing makes him see more.

At the same time, the text complicates that heightened perception with self-suspicion. He registers every glance upward from the page, every look at the girls passing by, every involuntary scan, and he reflects on how such acts would appear if externally logged. This reflexivity is crucial. The passage is not content merely to present desire; it also stages the speaker’s awareness of how desire is read, misread, pathologized, and politicized. His eyes move with the “desiccated habit” of masculine scanning even as he insists that his deeper attention lies elsewhere. That distinction matters for the passage’s larger argument about cancel culture and moral surveillance: what condemns is often not simply action but the optics of action, the visible “ticker tape” of looks stripped from context and replayed as proof of guilt. In this way, the text places erotic attention within a broader framework of social accusation and interpretive violence.

The “golden hour” itself then becomes more than a visual condition. It is a temporal and emotional hinge. The light, the foliage, the air, and the city’s flowering trees are all rendered as fleeting intensities, and the speaker’s wish to take her to the park before sunset reveals a familiar structure of desire in the passage: the wish to renew his own perceptions by seeing them through her. This is one of the most revealing and tender aspects of the piece. He wants not only to possess or enjoy but to reexperience the world by way of her freshness. The relationship is therefore bound up with aesthetic revitalization. She is not merely beloved; she is a medium through which deadened wonder can flare again.

Yet that aesthetic idealization is immediately interrupted by the actual encounter. When she emerges, she does so not in the anticipated glow of reunion but in visible frustration and fatigue. The emotional core of the passage turns here. Her grievance about the “Persona Project” assignment becomes the occasion for a remarkable dialogue about stereotyping, profiling, race, pedagogy, and institutional liberalism. The exchange is animated, funny, and intellectually alive, but it is also revealing of the relational structure between them. He plays interpreter, theorist, and devil’s advocate; she plays the role of the intuitively sharp, wounded, resistant student who both needs and resists his framing. The energy between them depends on this tension. She wants to be seen “for me,” not boxed by assumptions, and the conversation about the teacher’s race-based writing guideline becomes a synecdoche for that broader demand.

What the passage captures especially well is the difference between formal permission and practical coercion. The guideline is “not a formal rule,” yet the burden of meeting in advance to “discuss the risks” makes deviation costly enough that the prohibition is effectively real. The speaker’s outrage is therefore not merely ideological; it is rhetorical and psychological. He is incensed by the softness of the coercion, by the way bureaucratic discouragement masks itself as optionality. This section’s satire of academic culture is sharp precisely because it is embedded in living dialogue rather than abstract polemic. The girl’s irreverent phrasing and his escalating disbelief sharpen each other, transforming a classroom handout into a miniature theory of how institutions chill imagination while congratulating themselves for tolerance.

The subsequent erotic exchange does not feel appended; it feels continuous with everything that precedes it. That continuity is the passage’s most daring feature. The same conversation that reveals her intelligence, her frustration with being stereotyped, and his rage at institutional hypocrisy also deepens their physical intimacy. The sexual dialogue is therefore not presented as a separate register of “mere lust,” but as another language through which reassurance, hierarchy, tenderness, and need are negotiated. It is also strikingly reciprocal. Even where the power imbalance is evident, the exchange is structured through prompting, invitation, performance, and mutual excitation. This is part of why the later emotional turn lands so hard: sex here is not just release but adhesive.

That turn arrives with her exhausted confession about wanting to run away and possibly live with him. The passage shifts suddenly from flirtation and dirty play into domestic desperation. The mention of feeding people, of a mother who “gotta get her stank ass up,” of her doing everything, all relocates the relationship inside a context of burden and deprivation. His silence in response is one of the most eloquent moments in the piece. It is not simply “post-orgasm silence,” as she teases, but the silence produced when fantasy runs headlong into logistical reality. The relationship has sustained itself in a zone where care, conversation, and sexuality can flourish, but the question of actual incorporation—of literal rescue, cohabitation, responsibility—threatens to reorganize everything.

The final reassurance, “I’m never pushing you away,” therefore carries tremendous weight. It is tender, but it is also strategically noncommittal. He does not say she can come live with him; he says he will not reject her. The distinction is morally and emotionally significant. The passage closes not on resolution but on the management of attachment: enough comfort to keep the bond alive, not enough clarity to collapse its tension. That unresolved state is integral to the passage’s power. “Golden Hour” is not simply a love scene, not simply a political conversation, not simply a portrait of exploitation or tenderness. It is a study in how all these can coexist in one charged relational field, illuminated by a fading light that makes everything briefly seem more beautiful, more possible, and more doomed to pass.

Meta Description:
This “Golden Hour” portion of “Hypocorism” explores the fusion of aesthetic perception, institutional critique, erotic intimacy, and emotional dependency during a charged after-school pickup, revealing a relationship sustained by conversation, fantasy, and unresolved need.

Keywords:
Golden Hour, Hypocorism, prose analysis, erotic dialogue, institutional critique, desire and perception, emotional dependency, pedagogical satire, relational intensity, after-school scene, literary analysis

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 4/5/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 4/5/26

Golden Hour Portion of "Hypocorism" (ROUND 1)

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/19/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/19/26

Sucia (ROUND 1)

“Sucia” is a compact poem about the aftermath of sexual abuse and the catastrophic way it can reorganize a child’s body, behavior, and family life. Its central claim is not that the mother merely misperceives the girl as sexualized, but that the boyfriend’s abuse has in fact made the preteen hypersexual—has turned “every hole” into “an agent / ravenous and scheming.” The poem’s language is deliberately harsh because it is trying to name one of abuse’s ugliest consequences: the child’s body and desire have been distorted by violation, trained into compulsive erotic responsiveness before she has the maturity to understand or govern it.

That opening image is crucial. The boyfriend has “turned every hole of your preteen / into an agent,” meaning the child has been altered at the level of instinct and embodiment. The word “agent” matters because it suggests activity, appetite, and strategy. The abuse has not left her inert; it has made her body hungry, manipulative even, not by nature but by conditioning. The poem is therefore confronting a truth that is morally difficult but psychologically recognizable: sexual abuse can produce hypersexual behavior in the child who has been abused. The girl is not thereby culpable, but neither is she untouched. The poem refuses the easier language of passive innocence only because it is interested in the damage as it actually unfolds.

This is what makes the mother’s position so terrible. After learning what her boyfriend has done, “it was hard to tell what was worse”: slapping the girl and calling her “Dirty slut!” or continuing to let the man persuade her that kicking the girl out would be cruel. The force of the poem lies in this impossible bind. The mother is not simply projecting fantasy onto an innocent child; she is reacting to a real transformation in the girl, one induced by the man’s abuse. The girl’s emerging sexualized behavior now tears through the household, and the mother responds in two equally disastrous ways. One is direct violence and shaming. The other is sentimental paralysis, allowing the abuser to remain and to keep defining the situation.

The title, “Sucia,” intensifies that tragedy. The slur does not tell us what the girl is in any deep moral sense; it tells us how the damage appears within the family. She has become “dirty” not because she chose corruption, but because corruption has been worked into her. The mother’s slap and insult are thus acts of secondary violence, punishing the child for what was made of her. At the same time, the poem does not spare the girl’s altered sexuality its full ugliness. It insists that the abuse has made her bodily and psychically dangerous within the domestic space—not dangerous in the sense of blameworthiness, but dangerous in the sense that the abuse now reproduces itself through her changed appetites and behaviors.

The line “leaking him that night” is especially devastating. It shows the mother still sleeping with the boyfriend, still physically bound to him, even after discovering what he has done. This is not incidental hypocrisy. It reveals how abuse persists inside systems of dependency and desire. The man remains erotically and emotionally central enough that the mother continues to take him in, literally and bodily, while trying to decide what to do about the daughter he has transformed. The poem’s horror is that the mother’s two options are both betrayals: strike the girl as if she were the author of the problem, or keep the man and call expulsion “cruel.” In both cases, the child remains trapped inside the consequences of what he has done to her.

What makes “Sucia” so strong is its compression. It does not explain the whole history of the household or moralize from above. Instead, it isolates the instant in which revelation, rage, desire, and complicity collide. The poem’s insight is that abuse does not only injure the child once; it can reshape the child into someone whose sexuality has been prematurely and monstrously awakened, forcing everyone around her to respond to a condition they helped create or failed to stop. “Sucia” is unsparing because it wants to show that the real obscenity is not a mother’s false perception, but the fact that the abuse has made the girl genuinely hypersexual before her time—and then left the adults to punish her for it.

Meta Description:
“Sucia” is a stark poem about a preteen girl made hypersexual by her mother’s boyfriend’s abuse, and the mother’s catastrophic response of both shaming the child and remaining bound to the abuser. The poem examines sexual conditioning, secondary violence, and family collapse in the wake of abuse.

Keywords:
child sexual abuse, hypersexuality after abuse, maternal betrayal, secondary trauma, victim shaming, family violence, grooming consequences, abuse and conditioning, domestic collapse, poetic compression, altered childhood sexuality

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/18/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/18/26

Sinners Portion of "Hypocorism" (ROUND 1)

Let’s workshop this portion of a story about an adult-minor romance I have been working hard on behind the scenes over the last months--this portion being relevant given the Oscar success of Sinners.

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/17/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/17/26

Modern Geometry (ROUND 1)

“Modern Geometry” is a short, nostalgic poem about the tactile rituals of school life, using the act of covering a textbook with a brown grocery bag as a metaphor for discipline, identity formation, and a specifically American idea of doing things the proper way. The poem’s title is ironic and precise: the “geometry” in question is not mathematical but manual—the careful folding, creasing, and measuring required to make the cover fit exactly. What might seem like a trivial classroom habit becomes, in the poem’s treatment, a small initiation into order, self-control, and belonging.

The opening lines focus on the physical wear of use: “Skin oil and fretful friction / had teased a fuzzy nap / along the spine of his textbook.” The detail is intimate and exact. The book is not just an object but something handled constantly, worried at, pressed, and rubbed by anxious hands. The phrase “fretful friction” suggests both nervous energy and the repetitive motions of a student trying to keep things neat while living inside the restless atmosphere of adolescence. The worn nap on the paper bag shows how time and touch leave marks, even on something meant to protect the book.

The middle image shifts to the construction of the cover itself: “a brown grocery bag / folded with triple-checked tension / into creaking sleeves.” The language gives the act a kind of ceremonial gravity. The folds must be exact, the tension just right, the sleeves snug. The creaking paper evokes the sensory memory of thick grocery bags being bent into shape, a sound familiar to anyone who went through classrooms where this ritual was expected. The precision of the folding mirrors the precision suggested by the title, turning a mundane school task into a kind of craft.

The final lines introduce the poem’s key idea: “for he would not cheat / the American rite— / not a single piece of tape.” The refusal to use tape is what transforms the scene from simple description into cultural commentary. Covering books without tape was often treated as a small test of skill and patience, something learned from parents, teachers, or older siblings. Calling it an “American rite” elevates the act into a shared cultural practice, a minor initiation into rules, effort, and pride in doing something correctly without shortcuts. The insistence on no tape suggests an ethic of self-reliance: the cover must hold by the strength of its folds alone.

The poem’s humor lies in how seriously it treats such a small thing, but the seriousness is not entirely ironic. The careful folding becomes a symbol of a time when order, neatness, and doing things the right way carried moral weight, even in childhood. The “modern” in the title hints that this kind of geometry may no longer be common, making the memory feel both precise and slightly lost.

Meta Description:
A nostalgic poem about covering school textbooks with brown grocery bags, using the ritual of careful folding without tape as a metaphor for discipline, precision, and a small but meaningful American rite of childhood.

Keywords:
nostalgia poetry, school rituals, brown paper book covers, childhood discipline, American rite, tactile memory, classroom culture, metaphor of folding, everyday craftsmanship, coming-of-age details, modern geometry poem

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/16/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/16/26

Three Lip Bites (ROUND 1)

“Three Lip Bites” is a compressed poem about adolescent jealousy, erotic hierarchy, and the humiliating discovery that desire does not always follow the script of innocent proximity. Its emotional force depends on a sharp asymmetry: the speaker is a schoolboy nursing tender, labor-intensive hopes for his ninth-grade crush, while the girl herself is drawn not toward a peer but toward a much older man—“former security / here”—whose age, authority residue, and rough charisma place him in an entirely different erotic category. The poem thus captures not just unrequited affection but the boy’s initiation into a disturbing social truth: the girl he idealizes is already oriented toward a world of adult danger and status that makes his own fantasies of care feel small, naïve, and irrelevant.

The opening image situates the speaker in confinement and impotence. He watches “from the bus window,” already separated from the scene by glass, transit, and institutional routine. His nervous body registers the shock before his mind can fully process it: he is “wringing / the brown-bag textbook / to a muggy bow.” That detail is exquisitely chosen. The textbook, wrapped and school-bound, stands for his own world—study, discipline, ordinary adolescent aspiration. Twisting it into a damp bow turns that world into something physically deformed by feeling. The gesture is private, self-contained, and powerless, a bodily analogue to the poem’s title: lip bites, textbook wringing, all the minor violences by which one tries to endure public humiliation without outwardly breaking.

The girl appears next, “sag[ging] against a car vibrating bass,” and the poem immediately makes clear that she belongs, at least in this moment, to a sensory and social realm far beyond the speaker’s careful plans. The bass-heavy car culture, the outdoor sexual display, the slouching bodily ease—all of it contrasts with the boy on the bus holding his schoolbook. Then comes the crucial figure: “a durag thug (former security / here).” The parenthetical is everything. This is not some slightly older local boy; he is an adult man, well past school age, someone who once occupied a quasi-authoritative role around the school and now returns as an object of erotic attraction. The speaker recognizes him not merely as a rival but as a man whose age and aura carry their own charge. The girl’s desire is directed upward and outward—toward maturity, hardness, danger, and social power.

That is why the next image lands so brutally: he is “palming her ass like property.” From the speaker’s vantage, the gesture is not romantic but proprietary, and the phrase “like property” reveals both moral revulsion and jealousy. Yet the poem’s key complication is that the girl is not being described as passive clay. The poem’s pain depends on her attraction to this older man. She is choosing the vibration, the public sexuality, the charged age gap, the hard-edged masculinity embodied by someone “former security here.” That fact makes the speaker’s suffering more acute. He is not simply losing to a peer or watching coercion from afar; he is realizing that what he has to offer—attention, patience, “up-all-night plans / to walk her home”—is not what she wants.

Those final lines expose the poem’s emotional center. The scene is “a ‘fuck you’ to up-all-night plans / to walk her home.” The boy’s imagined devotion is modest, deferential, almost quaint. He does not fantasize conquest but accompaniment. He stays up thinking about how to be near her, how to protect or escort her, how to make himself useful in the register of care. What devastates him is not simply that she is with someone else, but that her desire appears to negate the whole value system his plans embodied. The older man’s hand on her body seems to mock the boy’s tenderness itself. The poem therefore stages a quintessential adolescent wound: the discovery that sincerity, patience, and thoughtfulness do not guarantee erotic relevance—and may in fact look powerless beside the swagger of someone older, rougher, and more socially commanding.

The title, “Three Lip Bites,” crystallizes the poem’s method. Lip biting is a small, private reflex of restraint—part pain, part desire, part self-control. The number gives the gesture ritual precision, as if the speaker counts his own silent injuries while the bus rolls past. The poem is built from such minor containments. There is no confrontation, no speech, no melodramatic outburst. Instead, humiliation is internalized into the body: bitten lips, wrung textbook, swallowed recognition. This restraint is what gives the poem its sting. It understands that adolescence is often defined not by grand events but by these tiny moments in which one learns, all at once, about classed desire, sexual power, age asymmetry, and one’s own disposability in another person’s fantasy life.

Meta Description:
“Three Lip Bites” is a concise poem about adolescent humiliation and unrequited desire, in which a schoolboy watches his ninth-grade crush openly drawn to a much older former school security guard, turning his tender plans to walk her home into a bitter lesson in erotic hierarchy.

Keywords:
adolescent jealousy, age-gap desire, older man younger girl, unrequited crush, erotic hierarchy, school setting, humiliation, male adolescence, public sexuality, classed masculinity, power and attraction, poetic compression, coming-of-age pain

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 8/16/24 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 8/16/24

MAPs

"MAPs" serves as a potent, albeit minimalistic, exploration of the dark and complex relationship between early childhood experiences and the development of deviant sexual attractions, particularly among minor-attracted persons (MAPs). Through a juxtaposition of vivid, culturally resonant imagery, such as the iconic Judy Garland ruby slippers and the innocent setting of monkey bars, the poem subtly yet powerfully reflects on how moments from childhood, often marked by innocence, can crystallize into disturbing fetishes in adulthood. The poem’s brevity intensifies its impact, leaving much to the reader’s interpretation, which mirrors the often elusive and shadowy nature of such psychological developments.

The work encourages a scholarly dialogue on the ways in which early formative experiences, including those that might seem insignificant or innocent at the time, can leave indelible marks on the psyche, potentially steering individuals towards complex and problematic sexual identities. By using minimal language to evoke powerful and disturbing images, the poem suggests that these early encounters with seemingly benign objects or scenarios can become deeply embedded in the psyche, shaping future sexual inclinations in ways that are difficult to unpack or confront.

The poem also touches on broader themes such as the societal taboo surrounding discussions of MAPs, the stigma that obscures open discourse on how such predilections form, and the often tragic outcomes when these tendencies are not understood or addressed early on. The minimalism of the poem is intentional, reflecting the stark and often unspoken reality of these issues, forcing the reader to confront the unsettling implications without the comfort of elaborate explanations or justifications.

MAPs, minor-attracted persons, sexual fetishes, psychological development, childhood experiences, deviant attractions, human sexuality, taboo, societal stigma, poetry analysis, minimalist poetry, disturbing imagery.

If it were true what in the end would be gained? Nothing but another truth. Is this such a mighty advantage? We have enough old truths still to digest, and even these we would be quite unable to endure if we did not sometimes flavor them with lies.

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Don’t let anyone tell you that real life is lacking in poetic interest. This is exactly what the poet is for: he has the mind and the imagination to find something of interest in everyday things. Real life supplies the motifs, the points that need to be said—the actual heart of the matter; but it is the poet’s job to fashion it all into a beautiful, animated whole. You are familiar with Fürnstein, the so-called “nature poet”? He has written a poem about growing hops, and you couldn’t imagine anything nicer. I have now asked him to write some poems celebrating the work of skilled artisans, in particular weavers, and I am quite sure he will succeed; he has lived among such people from an early age, he knows the subject inside out, and will be in full command of his material. That is the advantage of small works: you need only choose subjects that you know and have at your command. With a longer poetic work, however, this is not possible. There is no way around it: all the different threads that tie the whole thing together, and are woven into the design, have to be shown in accurate detail. Young people only have a one-sided view of things, whereas a longer work requires a multiplicity of viewpoints—and that’s where they come unstuck.—Goethe (Conversations with Eckermann)

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Fuckbot Errands (ROUND 1)

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Salome (ROUND 1)

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Sucia (ROUND 2)

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Munecas de Trapo (ROUND 1)

BIPOC Stockholm Syndrome (ROUND 1)

An Organic Ramiro d’Orco (ROUND 1)

Sinners Portion of "Hypocorism" (ROUND 2)

Let’s workshop this portion of a story about an adult-minor romance I have been working hard on behind the scenes over the last months--this portion being relevant given the Oscar success of Sinners.

The Bad Seed (ROUND 1)

Golden Hour Portion of "Hypocorism" (ROUND 2)

Golden Hour Portion of "Hypocorism" (ROUND 1)

Sucia (ROUND 1)

Sinners Portion of "Hypocorism" (ROUND 1)

Let’s workshop this portion of a story about an adult-minor romance I have been working hard on behind the scenes over the last months--this portion being relevant given the Oscar success of Sinners.

Modern Geometry (ROUND 1)

Three Lip Bites (ROUND 1)

MAPs

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