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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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Posts
Gorilla Fingers in Flickering Sodium Vapor (ROUND 1)
This poem, “Gorilla Fingers in Flickering Sodium Vapor,” is a study in distance—temporal, spatial, and perceptual—using a brief transactional scene to explore how environments of deprivation and illegality can feel both immediate and unreal to those passing through them. Its power lies in the way it compresses a specific memory into an atmosphere shaped by light, texture, and dislocation.
The opening image—“Brown schwag, brick bud / flat as a flower in a bible”—sets the tone through juxtaposition. The marijuana is rendered both degraded (“schwag,” “brick”) and oddly sanctified by the simile of a pressed flower. This comparison elevates what is typically dismissed as low-grade material into something preserved, almost devotional. The effect is not to romanticize the object but to complicate its status. Even within a context of scarcity or illegality, there remains an impulse to aestheticize, to find form and meaning.
The method of exchange—“passed through a doorknob hole”—introduces the poem’s central motif of partial contact. The transaction is mediated, indirect, stripped of full human encounter. What is exchanged is not just goods but fragments of presence. This is reinforced in the next lines: “hands alive within the boarded / rowhouses.” The bodies remain unseen; only the hands emerge, animated yet disembodied. The title’s “gorilla fingers” suggests both physicality and distortion, hinting at how the observers perceive these unseen others—through exaggeration, fear, or the dim lighting conditions of “flickering sodium vapor.”
The setting—“90s-era Newburgh”—anchors the poem historically and geographically, invoking a period and place associated with economic decline and urban abandonment. The “boarded rowhouses” and “stoop gone to rubble” evoke systemic deterioration, but the poem resists overt commentary. Instead, it presents these details as part of a sensory field: textures of ruin, fragments of architecture, glimpses of life persisting within collapse.
The final lines shift the poem’s perspective outward. As the speakers drive “home across the Hudson,” the scene is reframed through distance. What was just experienced remains “unreal.” This unreality is not due to disbelief but to disjunction. The environment encountered feels incompatible with the speakers’ own world, even though it is geographically proximate. The river becomes both literal and symbolic—a boundary separating lived realities that coexist yet do not fully register as continuous.
What the poem ultimately captures is the instability of perception when confronted with unfamiliar or marginalized spaces. The observers are physically present, engaged in transaction, yet their understanding remains partial. The hands in the dark, the mediated exchange, the quick departure—all contribute to a sense that the encounter never fully resolves into comprehension. It lingers instead as an image: vivid, tactile, and strangely unreal.
In its brevity, “Gorilla Fingers in Flickering Sodium Vapor” reveals how easily human presence can be reduced to fragments under certain conditions, and how those fragments, filtered through light, distance, and prior expectation, can take on an almost mythic quality. The poem does not explain this transformation; it records it, leaving the reader to confront the gap between what is seen and what is understood.
Meta Description:
A brief poem depicting a mediated drug transaction in a decaying urban setting, exploring perception, distance, and the surreal quality of fragmented human encounters.
Keywords:
Gorilla Fingers in Flickering Sodium Vapor, urban decay, perception, distance, drug culture, disembodiment, 1990s Newburgh, imagery, poetic analysis
Mistaken Identity (ROUND 1)
This poem, “Mistaken Identity,” is a study in temporal shock and emotional irreversibility, examining how even a rescinded catastrophe can permanently alter the psyche. Its power lies in its precision: the poem isolates a single sequence—notification of a child’s death followed by its retraction—and treats it not as correction but as rupture. The central claim is implicit but forceful: once certain knowledge enters consciousness, even briefly, it cannot be fully undone.
The opening phrase, “The sharpest whiplash,” establishes the governing structure: a violent oscillation between extremes. “Perdition / to paradise” compresses the entire emotional spectrum into a single movement, suggesting not gradual transition but instantaneous reversal. Yet the poem immediately complicates this binary. The movement is not symmetrical. The descent into “perdition” occurs through language—“Your child has died”—and it unfolds over time, as the mind struggles to process what it has heard.
The middle lines introduce one of the poem’s most striking images: grief “beaded at first, / like water on houseplant soil / hardened by tragedy.” This simile captures the initial resistance of the psyche. Just as water cannot immediately penetrate compacted soil, the news does not at first fully register. It sits on the surface, unreal, unabsorbed. But the image also implies inevitability. Given time, the water will seep in; the shock will reach “the root ball.” The metaphor is botanical but also psychological, suggesting that grief is not merely felt but absorbed into the system that sustains life.
Crucially, the reversal—“Wrong girl”—arrives only after this absorption has begun. The apology is “choked,” indicating both the speaker’s discomfort and the inadequacy of language to repair what has been done. The correction does not erase the initial statement; it comes too late. The psyche has already initiated the process of mourning. The emotional and physiological cascade triggered by the first message cannot simply be halted or reversed.
The poem’s insight, then, concerns the asymmetry between information and retraction. To be told that one’s child has died is not equivalent, in experiential terms, to being told that this is not the case. The first statement generates a full imaginative and emotional reality—visions of loss, collapse of future, identity rupture as a parent. The second statement cancels the fact but not the experience. The parent has, in a sense, already lived through the death, however briefly.
The title, “Mistaken Identity,” extends this insight beyond the immediate scenario. The error is not merely about confusing one individual for another; it is about the misalignment between reality and the mind’s rapid construction of meaning. Identity here is bound to narrative: the parent momentarily inhabits the identity of someone who has lost a child. That identity, once assumed, leaves a residue even after it is technically invalidated.
In its brevity, the poem demonstrates how quickly the mind can be thrust into extremity and how little time is required for irreversible change to occur. It suggests that certain experiences are defined not by duration but by intensity and by the depth to which they penetrate. Even a corrected error can leave a lasting imprint if it is allowed to reach the “root.”
Meta Description:
A concise poem exploring the irreversible psychological impact of mistaken death notification, showing how even briefly believed tragedy can permanently alter perception and identity.
Keywords:
Mistaken Identity, grief, psychological shock, trauma, perception, identity, error and correction, emotional irreversibility, poetic analysis
Trauma Circuit (ROUND 1)
“Trauma Circuit” is a compact poem about the conversion of suffering into vocation, identity, and performance. Its central subject is not trauma itself but the recursive economy that forms around its retelling: the way an original wound, once repeatedly narrated in public, can harden into brand, script, and self-justifying mission. The poem’s title is exact. A “circuit” suggests both repetition and transmission—something electrical, something routed, something that keeps current flowing by never quite breaking the loop. Trauma here is no longer a singular event in the past; it has become an ongoing system.
The opening lines establish that system through the phrase “On loop you retell the horror.” The horror is not denied or trivialized. What changes is its mode of existence. It returns through repetition, and repetition cleans it up. “Clean as branding” is the poem’s most incisive phrase. Branding carries a double charge: it evokes both scarification and marketing. The original pain has been rendered legible, streamlined, and usable. It is no longer raw but polished into a recognizable narrative unit, something fit for circulation before audiences. The horror remains, but in mediated form—purified enough to travel.
The second movement turns inward. The speaker addresses a “role-auditor within,” a remarkably rich phrase suggesting an internalized evaluator that measures authenticity, consistency, and perhaps marketability. This inner figure is called a “daimon,” giving it both classical and psychological resonance. It is conscience, familiar spirit, and prosecuting intelligence at once. Crucially, this daimon is not soothed by repetition. It grows more suspicious. Its doubt increases “with each speaking fee,” meaning that the monetization of testimony intensifies rather than resolves the ethical problem. The more the story is rewarded, the more unstable its moral ground becomes. The poem is therefore acutely sensitive to the conflict between witness and commodification: one may speak in good faith and still feel corrupted by the conditions under which one is heard.
The quoted justification—“a personal sacrifice… / to build a future / where no one else will suffer”—reveals how this economy sustains itself. The repeated retelling is cast as noble burden, something endured not for status or profit but for collective good. The poem does not entirely dismiss this claim. It may be true. But the whispering tone matters. This is not public declaration but private reassurance, spoken to the internal auditor whose skepticism cannot be fully silenced. The speaker must keep explaining the moral purpose of the performance because the performance itself increasingly invites doubt. In that sense, the poem is about ethical slippage: not hypocrisy exactly, but the way sincere mission becomes entangled with incentive, applause, and self-construction.
What makes “Trauma Circuit” so strong is its refusal of easy judgment. It does not sneer at trauma testimony, nor does it sanctify it. Instead, it isolates the psychological toll of turning pain into public labor. To survive trauma is one thing; to become professionally legible through it is another. The poem understands that the same act can be both altruistic and self-serving, both necessary and deadening. The “circuit” keeps running because there are audiences, fees, and futures to justify—but also because the self has become wired around this repetition. The horror is retold to help others, yes, but also to maintain a role, to answer the daimon, to keep meaning from collapsing.
In just a few lines, the poem captures a distinctly modern predicament: the transformation of suffering into platform. Its brilliance lies in showing that the deepest conflict is not between public and private, but within the self that must keep deciding whether its witness is still witness—or whether it has become something cleaner, sharper, and more profitable than pain was ever meant to be.
Meta Description:
A concise poem about the repeated public retelling of trauma, “Trauma Circuit” explores how suffering becomes branding, vocation, and inner ethical conflict as testimony turns into a professional role.
Keywords:
trauma narrative, branding, commodification of suffering, public testimony, ethical conflict, repetition, identity formation, speaking circuit, self-performance, modern lyric poetry
Sound Off (ROUND 1)
This poem, “Sound Off,” is a tightly compressed exploration of militarized masculinity, ritual humiliation, and the transformation of the individual body into an object of spectacle within institutional power structures. Through its clipped, rhythmic lines, it captures not just an event but an atmosphere—one in which discipline, degradation, and performance collapse into a single experience.
The opening command—“moan like a gook”—immediately situates the scene within a framework of racialized dehumanization. The language is not incidental; it is functional. By forcing the recruit to vocalize in a way that mimics a dehumanized other, the drill instructor collapses identity into caricature. This is a key mechanism of control: the stripping away of individuality through imposed performance. The recruit is not simply being ordered to obey but to embody humiliation.
Sound and rhythm play a central role. The desk-thumping, the cadence calls (“Eskimo pussy is mighty cold”), the squeal of boots—all contribute to a percussive environment in which the body is synchronized with command. The phrase “double-time” underscores this: movement is accelerated, intensified, and made collective. Individual agency dissolves into tempo. The body becomes an instrument, responding reflexively to external beats rather than internal intention.
The middle of the poem shifts from sound to exposure. The “bare ass” is not merely physical vulnerability but staged vulnerability—“parades” suggests that the humiliation is not private but performed for an audience. The phrase “good boy” adds another layer, infantilizing the subject while simultaneously affirming compliance. This combination of degradation and approval is psychologically potent: the recruit is conditioned to associate submission with reward.
The final image—“the valley of squad-bay attention”—elevates the scene into something almost ceremonial. The “valley” suggests a spatial dip, a focal point into which all attention flows. The squad bay, a space of collective living and surveillance, becomes a theater. The body on display is both punished and exhibited, its humiliation serving as a lesson to others. Discipline here is not just corrective but demonstrative.
What emerges is a portrait of how institutions produce conformity not only through rules but through orchestrated experiences that merge sound, movement, language, and spectacle. The poem does not moralize explicitly; instead, it presents the mechanics of power in action. The result is unsettling precisely because of its economy. In just a few lines, it reveals how identity can be reshaped through ritualized degradation, and how the body itself becomes the medium through which authority is inscribed.
Meta Description:
A concise poem analyzing militarized discipline, racialized language, and ritual humiliation, showing how institutions reshape identity through performance and control.
Keywords:
military training, discipline, humiliation, institutional power, racialization, masculinity, performance, authority, body and control
Why We Need War (ROUND 1)
This poem, “Why We Need War,” operates as a compact but incisive satire of technological desire, aesthetic normalization, and the creeping dehumanization embedded in contemporary ideals of beauty. Through its compressed imagery, it traces a trajectory from cosmetic enhancement to artificial replication, ultimately questioning what is lost when human irregularity is smoothed into standardized perfection.
The opening lines establish a world in which exaggerated, artificial features—“lips stuffed / like duck liver,” a forehead rendered inert “like a pet”—have become not aberrations but norms of “decency.” The diction is deliberately grotesque. By comparing cosmetic augmentation to force-feeding or domestication, the poem reframes what is often marketed as enhancement as a kind of violence against organic form. Beauty here is no longer an expression of individuality but a convergence toward a uniform, engineered aesthetic.
This normalization of artificiality sets the stage for the poem’s speculative turn. If human faces increasingly resemble static, manufactured surfaces, then “fuck-bot companies” (a deliberately jarring term) can “scale back biomimicry.” The implication is that as humans approximate machines, machines no longer need to approximate humans. The boundary between organic and synthetic collapses not because technology advances alone, but because human self-modification meets it halfway.
The final lines introduce a counterforce: deviance, curiosity, and the persistence of desire for what remains irreducibly human. The imagined “deviant kids” discover “kink / in facial mobility,” finding fascination not in perfected stillness but in micro-expressions—“crow’s feet of joy, brow arches of fear.” What had been erased or minimized in the pursuit of idealized beauty returns as the new site of erotic and aesthetic interest. Imperfection, movement, and emotional legibility become fetishized precisely because they have been rendered scarce.
The title, “Why We Need War,” reframes the poem’s critique in broader, more provocative terms. War is not invoked literally but metaphorically, as a disruptive force capable of breaking cycles of homogenization and complacency. If society drifts toward sterile uniformity—faces frozen, expressions minimized, bodies standardized—then some form of rupture becomes necessary to reintroduce variation, unpredictability, and vitality. The poem suggests that without such disruption, even desire itself risks becoming mechanized.
In its brief span, the poem thus maps a paradox: the more we pursue perfected, controlled versions of ourselves, the more value shifts to what escapes control—movement, irregularity, the fleeting signals of inner life. What is framed as progress may, in fact, produce a hunger for the very qualities it eliminates.
Meta Description:
A satirical poem examining cosmetic normalization, artificial beauty, and the shifting boundary between human and machine, exploring how perfection erases and then revalorizes authentic expression.
Keywords:
satire, artificial beauty, cosmetic culture, technology and humanity, biomimicry, dehumanization, desire, expression, modern aesthetics
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FAQ
Visit my Substack: Hive Being
Visit my Substack: Hive Being
Don’t let anyone tell you that real life is lacking in poetic interest. This is exactly what the poet is for: he has the mind and the imagination to find something of interest in everyday things. Real life supplies the motifs, the points that need to be said—the actual heart of the matter; but it is the poet’s job to fashion it all into a beautiful, animated whole. You are familiar with Fürnstein, the so-called “nature poet”? He has written a poem about growing hops, and you couldn’t imagine anything nicer. I have now asked him to write some poems celebrating the work of skilled artisans, in particular weavers, and I am quite sure he will succeed; he has lived among such people from an early age, he knows the subject inside out, and will be in full command of his material. That is the advantage of small works: you need only choose subjects that you know and have at your command. With a longer poetic work, however, this is not possible. There is no way around it: all the different threads that tie the whole thing together, and are woven into the design, have to be shown in accurate detail. Young people only have a one-sided view of things, whereas a longer work requires a multiplicity of viewpoints—and that’s where they come unstuck.—Goethe (Conversations with Eckermann)
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