< Blog >

 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

welcome

What is Hive Being, and Why the Name?

You have likely heard talk of a hive mind, where one global mind finds more or less figurative expression in various local minds. Such talk is common enough in nature documentaries, especially ones concerning ants or bees, and in sci-fi programs. Take that notion, at least a loose version of it, and broaden its scope. That will be a decent first step in understanding the title I have chosen both for my Blog and for the first five-volume installment of my magnum opus Made For You and Me, a fragmentary collection of minimalist stanzas from 2016 to 2020.

In alignment with Spinoza (the 17th Century Rationalist to whom I devoted my doctoral studies), I view reality in its totality as a grand hive Being: all entities are but pulsating manifestations of the buckstopping fount of everything, an ultimate being we might call “God” or “Nature” (so long as, out of respect for the capital “G” and the capital “N,” we limit it neither to some anthropomorphic cloud father hurling lightning bolts nor to mere wilderness untouched by human smog). According to the hive-Being view (where reality is one lone superorganism, a monistic—and we might even say unividualist—conception I defend in both my creative and academic capacities), each non-foundational being (each being, that is, whose essence does not involve existence) is an utterly necessitated expression or eruption or exudation of this eternal source—each is, perhaps better put, a mode or manner of being, and so a focal point through which is disclosed, what classical theists sometimes call “being itself” (ipsum esse subsistens): the realness of the real, the being of whatever may be, the sheer activity of being, the very isness of whatever is. This Blog, which duplicates my Substack, throbs as but one among many literary unfurlings of this self-necessitated foundation, this supreme wellspring, of which we—like black holes and broken beliefs, like fractal ferns and flickering flames—are the inevitable stylings.

My Journey

I am an academic who found himself pressured into early retirement by the rising tides of cancel culture. The illiberal scourge of censoring, silencing, and shaming—although always with us throughout our evolution—reached a local peak around 2021. That was the turbulent year my creative pursuits, which the old left once encouraged as a healthy outlet for the stresses of a childhood steeped in poverty and illiteracy, drew the ire of the new safe-space left. A small cadre of self-proclaimed victims and their allies, several of whom continue to berate me years later under pseudonyms as see through as their sexual infatuation, sought to erase me and my heterodoxy. They found support from a wannabe-woke dean, covered in the grand inquisitor robes of our decadent modernity (full-body tattoos) and just itching to signal his commitment to protecting “vulnerable populations” from triggering material (even if just, as it was in my case, off-duty poems “unbecoming for someone calling himself a teacher”). Although I eventually won my due-process case with the help of The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, I slunk away from a college that turned its back on protecting freedom of expression and from an institution increasingly intolerant of intellectual diversity.

The wrecking ball to my too-comfy office in the windowless ivory tower came with a silver lining. From the ashes of my professional aspirations rose a phoenix of increased freedom to fulfill the literary calling I have pursued for decades. Reputation concerns never stopped me, even within academia’s sterile halls of conformity. Indeed, my unapologetic defiance, which has long baffled friends and family, no doubt chummed even safe waters—almost as if I were asking for it all along—until the cancel shiver grew too frenzied to hold back its blind thrashings. But now, now I piston the most forbidden territories of human thought with no longer even a twinge of conscience. The newfound freedom means extra time to hone my craft. When not assisting special-needs communities (a day job far more rewarding than freeway-flyer drudgeries), I pursue my literary mission with Dionysian fervor.

Call for Co-Conspirators

This space, my digital sanctuary, showcases the fruits of my mission. Think of my posts, even those linking to my publications, as works in progress. I want your input, unflinching brutality included. Each post begins with an invitation to action: “Let’s workshop this [draft about x, y, z].” Your contributions, whether through public comments or my contact page, help hammer scraps of ore into polished blades fit for magazine publication.

Your input is valuable, even if you are neither a writer nor a reader of literature—twin disciplines dying by the cyber nanosecond. Sometimes—even if at the risk of uttering banalities—an outsider’s fresh vantage can pierce the veils of convention to reveal what insiders miss. It often takes an outsider to make us even think to question our ingrained presuppositions and attitudes. I stand by the hygienic value of contagion. That is one reason I advocate so strongly for intellectual diversity and freedom of expression. And that is also one reason I was so harrowed by the anti-diversity swell of cancel culture in academia (an institution that should be the utmost caretaker of such values)—harrowed especially insofar as that swell masqueraded under the gaslighting guise of “diversity”).

You will witness the breathing evolution of my writings over time. To track these changes, I label each revision by round: “ROUND 2,” ROUND 3,” and so forth. Each piece undergoes continuous refinement based on your feedback and my own revisitations. Sometimes changes will mar the work. That is the risk of creative tinkering as a finite creature. I hope you will alert me to missteps. After many semesters of university writing workshops, one rule has impressed itself upon me: when someone senses a flaw, something almost always needs to change—even if, yes, the proposed solution misses the mark (which often it does). From a quick look into the archives, accessible here, you can see how much I have benefited from your feedback so far.

My Hope

Sharing drafts can be daunting. But showing you the ravaged and unperfumed real deal unfiltered by makeup (stuttering starts and falsities, awkward line breaks and clumsy word choices, grammatical errors and misspellings)—that not only makes my work more relatable, but helps me refine things through your input. I hope the unfiltered look at the raw process of fumbling, rather than just the polished product, also helps other writers develop their craft. Imperfect works often instruct more than perfect ones: whereas the perfect ones tend to have a grace by which they slip inside us without activating our scrutiny, the imperfect ones—especially the near perfect ones—show us glaringly what not to do.

People laugh at me, seeing—in my tilting at the windmills of literary excellence—a Don Quixote clunking around in Arthurian armor in a post-knight era. I am not naïve. I am well aware of the diminishing ability to read, let alone well: slowly and deeply, with gratitude. I am also aware that my style, which often nests subpoints within larger points, never waters down virtuosity for the sake of mass appeal. I watch readers stumble over my sentences, unable to unlock even just the music of the envelope let alone the semantic meat within, which—given my tendency to flashlight through the darker facets of human nature (the addicts, the miscreants, the abusers among us)—only adds an additional alienating layer of difficulty). Beholding these depressive scenes of even supportive family members getting bucked off my syntactic bronco makes me feel like a dinosaur who should get a hint and, if not succumb to the brain rot of skibidi-toilet speak, just hang himself already. Even though the decline in linguistic background and grammatical voltage makes my compositions seem quixotic in a world binging Netflix and TikTok, I persist—raging against the dying of the light—by some internal compulsion to celebrate the richness of language and thought.

My hope is that, despite social media’s unparalleled power to farm our attention, people never forget the unique power of writing. Beyond unveiling hypocrisy, teasing out complex implications, and detailing the commonalities between even the most alien phenomena, writing offers something we need today—trapped in agoraphobic cyber bubbles only thickened by the Lyme dangers of forests and the COVID dangers of cities—perhaps more than ever. Granting us rich access to the first-person perspectives of others (to how things feel to them), writing serves as one of humanity’s best tools for combating loneliness. It allows us to linger, broadly and deeply and at high resolution, within the inner lives of others in a way that other arts can only suggest.

What to Expect

My work spans a broad spectrum: from metaphysical discourses on free will and determinism and the ontology of holes to the ephemera of western culture (whether the childhood impacts of the hypersexual mono-image of black woman as squirting twerkers or Terrence Howard’s sham revolution of mathematics). Some tight and minimal, others free-flowing sprawls; some heady and abstract, others emotional and imagistic—my inkwell musings, which often blend scholarly rigor with a dark humor from both high and low culture, aim to capture the visceral intensity of our personal and social and ultimately existential predicaments.

By no means can I deny that drug abuse, sexual assault, and the tales of the broken and the damned loom large in the tag cloud of my work. My writing will never be a paradise of easy truths and comforting lies. It will challenge you, provoke you, and at times even repulse you. I offer no apologies for the monsters I unleash. They are as much a part of us, at long root scared rodent mammals scurrying in the shadows of dinosaurs, as our noblest aspirations.

But make no mistake. It is not all downer darkness. The archives are my receipts. You will find pieces exploring the pursuit of authenticity in a media-saturated world, the search for meaning in an indifferent cosmos, and the celebration of beauty in both the sublime and the profane. I locate much of my inspiration, in fact, in novelists like Dostoevsky and poets like Ted Kooser—writers unafraid to pursue moral agendas or risk Hallmark sentimentality in an age that often sneers at sincerity.

Be they satirical dissections of modern social dynamics or poignant poems about addiction or academic articles on moral responsibility, my goal is to provoke thought, evoke emotion, and foster meaningful dialogue. Fear has not and will not stop me from challenging humanity’s fundamental taboos (like bestiality and cannibalism) or self-reflecting into the dark chaos of the subconscious, even if that means exposing the Jungian shadows—the inner Goebbels—lurking within us all!

Expect posts each day, no day missed. Donations are welcome, but I impose no paywall: it feels wrong to charge for art, especially given our date with obliteration. Feel free to explore what amounts to, at the time of writing this, close to a thousand pieces of poetry and prose here. That should give you a sense of what awaits.

Join me—specula holstered—on this literary odyssey into the public and private nooks of the hive Being. Let us navigate the labyrinth of creation together, confronting our demons and even slaying our darlings if we must. Let us dance on the razor’s edge between the sublime and the profane in pursuit of an elusive literary perfection never to be confused—as it has been confused in our declining civilization—with the pursuit of popularity or likeability over truth.

Featured Posts

Featured

AA Meeting (ROUND 5)

Pound Town: A Defense of the Moral Permissibility of Bestiality (ROUND 3)

Pound Town: A Defense of the Moral Permissibility of Bestiality (ROUND 2)

Squatter (ROUND 4)

Squatter (ROUND 3)

Squatter (Round 2)

An Introduction to Chaos Magic(k) (ROUND 12)

An Introduction to Chaos Magic(k) (ROUND 11)

An Introduction to Chaos Magic(k)

The Printout

AA Meeting

On The Forest Trail

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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 3/15/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/15/26

Plagues of the Special (ROUND 2)

“Plagues of the Special” is a compact satirical poem about hereditary exceptionalism—more specifically, about the way certain families or subcultures convert disorder, coincidence, fantasy, and anecdote into a lineage of chosenness. The title is doing immediate conceptual work. “Plagues” evokes affliction, visitation, and biblical curse, while “the Special” suggests those who understand themselves not as ordinary sufferers but as uniquely singled out. The poem therefore frames its subject as a paradox: the burden of being special becomes itself a treasured inheritance.

The opening lines present absurdly escalating paranormal claims as family traits: “flying-saucer / anal probes,” “handsy poltergeists,” “intrusive / previsions,” “holy statues / bleeding always off camera.” The humor comes from accumulation and deadpan inheritance logic. These are treated almost like eye color or heart disease—conditions that “run in the family.” By placing extraterrestrial assault, ghostly molestation, prophecy, and miracle-statue lore in the same genealogical basket, the poem satirizes a worldview in which extraordinary claims are normalized through kinship repetition. If enough relatives tell versions of the same story, the bizarre acquires the status of family fact.

At the same time, the poem is not only mocking paranormal belief. It is targeting a deeper psychological pattern: the desire to belong to a clan marked by special access to hidden reality. The family’s suffering is inseparable from its distinction. Their experiences are invasive, frightening, humiliating even—but also meaningful. To be probed, haunted, visited, or granted prevision is to matter in a cosmos that otherwise offers no personalized attention. The poem’s satire lands on that emotional economy: affliction becomes prestige.

The line about statues “bleeding always off camera” is especially sharp because it condenses a whole epistemology of unverifiability. Miracles occur, but never when documentation would settle the matter. The claim survives by permanently inhabiting the zone just beyond evidence. This prepares for the closing turn, where the neighbors are dismissed as “government shills.” Their testimony—that they “never saw one damn light”—cannot count as disconfirming evidence because the belief system has already immunized itself against contradiction. Skeptics are not merely mistaken; they are agents of suppression. In this sense, the poem skewers conspiracy logic as much as supernatural credulity. The absence of public corroboration is not a problem for the believer but proof of the cover-up.

The diction matters. “Government shills” and “all of the fuckers” inject a coarse populist rage that contrasts with the supposedly numinous subject matter. That tonal collision is part of the poem’s success. The language of cosmic mystery is dragged down into the idiom of neighborhood grievance and familial paranoia. The sublime becomes petty, and the petty becomes metaphysical.

What emerges is a portrait of a mentality structured by persecution and distinction at once. The family is beset by impossible phenomena, yet those same phenomena make them elect, initiated, more alive to hidden truths than the dull ordinary world around them. The “neighbors” stand for consensus reality—mundane, unglamorous, unenchanted. The family’s need is not merely to reject that reality but to vilify it. Ordinary people must be dupes or accomplices, because otherwise the family’s specialness would collapse into delusion.

The poem’s brevity is central to its force. It does not explain or diagnose; it lets the absurdity self-expose through compression. In just a few lines, it captures how extraordinary self-conceptions can become hereditary, how unverifiable claims gain force through repetition, and how contradiction is neutralized by conspiracy thinking. “Plagues of the Special” is therefore less a poem about UFOs or poltergeists than about the social and emotional uses of belief—especially beliefs that flatter the sufferer with the idea that their suffering proves they were chosen for more than ordinary life.

Meta Description:
A satirical poem about families who inherit paranormal afflictions as badges of specialness, “Plagues of the Special” skewers conspiracy thinking, unverifiable miracle claims, and the emotional prestige of being singled out by hidden forces.

Keywords:
satirical poetry, conspiracy mentality, paranormal belief, family mythology, chosen suffering, UFO abduction satire, miracle skepticism, hereditary specialness, unverifiable claims, social psychology of belief

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/14/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/14/26

MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 71)

This fragment from Made for You and Me 2: hive Being (2017—part 71) continues the mosaic method that defines the larger sequence, presenting a chain of brief, aphoristic observations that move rapidly across addiction, technology, religion, loneliness, identity politics, and mortality. As in earlier parts of the project, the stanzas do not build a linear argument. Instead, they accumulate pressure through juxtaposition, allowing recurring themes—especially dependency, displacement, and the search for meaning—to echo across otherwise unrelated scenes.

Several of the early lines focus on addiction as both escape and structure. The idea of seeking out abuse to distract from loneliness establishes a pattern that recurs throughout the fragment: destructive behavior is not portrayed as irrational chaos but as a strategy, however tragic, for managing emptiness. This logic appears again in the image of smoking the money meant for the bus to rehab, where the very act intended to enable recovery is consumed by the addiction it was meant to overcome. The line about dying just before a great leap in life extension adds a cosmic scale to the same theme, suggesting that human existence itself can feel like missing salvation by a fraction of time.

Domestic and suburban images appear alongside these darker reflections, creating contrast rather than relief. Soft-lit living rooms glimpsed from the street and homes filled with wilted plants evoke a quiet eeriness, a sense that ordinary stability can conceal stagnation or emotional decay. The poem repeatedly returns to interiors—rooms, houses, private spaces—as places where longing, disappointment, and strange realizations unfold.

One of the fragment’s recurring concerns is the tension between insight and timing. Characters come home eager to share new truths, only to find no one ready to hear them. A former crush fallen into addiction suddenly becomes approachable, but only under circumstances that distort what once felt romantic. A man realizes that the greatest gift he ever gave his daughter is simply his presence, yet this realization arrives only after years of neglect. These moments suggest that clarity often comes too late, or under conditions that make it painful rather than liberating.

The poem also engages philosophical and theological questions in the same compressed manner. The comparison between human “beer goggles” and a divine ability to experience every possible state imagines omniscience as total empathy rather than abstract knowledge. Elsewhere, the fragment questions how religious narratives could be sustained without someone breaking the silence, or how doctrines demanding moral certainty coexist with ordinary human hesitation. These lines do not resolve the questions they raise; they place them beside scenes of addiction, regret, and social pressure, implying that metaphysical speculation and daily struggle arise from the same need to make sense of experience.

Cultural and political tensions appear in similarly condensed form. The stanza about children being considered too immature for certain responsibilities yet expected to affirm complex identity decisions points to inconsistencies in how society defines agency. Other lines hint at institutional pressures, ideological conformity, or the uneasy relationship between science, industry, and belief. Because these observations appear as fragments rather than essays, they read less like arguments than like flashes of recognition.

The fragment repeatedly returns to the problem of belonging. A white man mistaken for a mannequin in Trinidad, a lover arriving too late in someone’s life, a former prisoner resolving to start over, a visitor offering forgiveness to a murderer—all of these images show people trying to find a place within social or moral worlds that do not easily accommodate them. Even tenderness appears in unlikely settings, such as the calm professionalism of guards escorting a condemned inmate, or the quiet intimacy of someone guiding a blind person’s hand while drawing.

The closing lines bring the fragment back to its central question: whether meaning comes from seeking or from being found. The final thought—whether love appears only when one is looking, depending on what counts as looking—captures the mood of the entire section. Throughout the mosaic, characters act, drift, relapse, hope, and reflect, never fully certain whether their efforts move them closer to fulfillment or simply circle the same unresolved needs.

Like the other parts of the hive Being sequence, part 71 works by letting these moments resonate against each other. Addiction echoes with religion, loneliness with ideology, domestic quiet with existential dread. The result is a portrait of contemporary life as a field of overlapping compulsions and revelations, where insight, regret, and longing continually coexist.

Meta Description:
A mosaic poem fragment from Made for You and Me 2: hive Being (2017—part 71) presenting aphoristic reflections on addiction, loneliness, belief, identity, and the search for meaning through a sequence of juxtaposed observations.

Keywords:
mosaic poetry, aphoristic sequence, addiction and loneliness, philosophical fragments, identity and agency, suburban imagery, religious reflection, regret and timing, contemporary culture, existential themes, hive Being poem series

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/13/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/13/26

Polishing the Family Silver (ROUND 1)

“Polishing the Family Silver” is a short satirical poem about inherited identity narratives and the way stories of suffering can become both shield and status marker. The title itself establishes the central metaphor. “Family silver” suggests something passed down through generations, something carefully maintained because it symbolizes lineage, continuity, and legitimacy. To polish the silver is not to create it but to keep it shining—to preserve a story about who one is and where one comes from. The poem applies this metaphor to a communal self-conception grounded not in achievement but in grievance, implying that the inherited narrative of injury is guarded with the same care as a treasured heirloom.

The opening lines describe how “the story about themselves / imparts such a sense / of lineal belonging / that they guard it.” The emphasis falls on the psychological function of the story. It provides coherence, a feeling of rootedness, a sense that one’s place in the world is secured by ancestry and shared experience. The comparison to a sanctuary reinforces the idea that this narrative is treated as sacred space, something not to be questioned without provoking defensiveness. What matters is not whether the story is fully accurate but that it binds the group together and gives meaning to present identity.

The poem’s tone shifts in the second half, where the preservation of that story is linked to “pity-exacting pageants / of self-sabotage.” The word “pageants” is important because it suggests performance. The poem implies that certain behaviors function not only as expressions of frustration or despair but also as public reenactments of the narrative of victimhood. These displays reaffirm the group’s sense of having been wronged, and the pity they provoke becomes part of the cycle that keeps the story alive. The satire lies in the suggestion that the performance can become self-perpetuating: the identity built on injury begins to require ongoing demonstrations of injury.

The poem then pushes this idea further with deliberately abrasive imagery of excess and self-destructive display. These details are not there simply for shock; they underline the claim that the performance has moved beyond protest or survival into spectacle. What once may have been a response to real hardship becomes stylized behavior that reinforces the inherited narrative. By presenting these actions as part of the ritual of belonging, the poem questions whether the community is protecting its members or trapping them within a role.

The closing line—“anoints them / supreme victims”—returns to the religious language introduced earlier with “sanctuary.” To be anointed is to be set apart, consecrated. Here the consecration is ironic: the highest status within the story is achieved not through accomplishment but through the ability to embody suffering most convincingly. The poem’s critique is therefore not of suffering itself but of the way suffering can become a form of cultural capital, something that grants authority and immunity within the group.

What makes the poem effective is its compression. In just a few lines it moves from inheritance, to performance, to sanctification, showing how identity can be stabilized through narratives that are both protective and limiting. The metaphor of polishing the family silver suggests that these narratives endure not because they are always true or helpful, but because they provide continuity, and continuity itself can feel too valuable to relinquish.

Meta Description:
A satirical poem about inherited victim narratives, using the metaphor of “family silver” to show how stories of suffering can become sacred traditions that provide belonging while encouraging performative self-destruction.

Keywords:
satirical poetry, identity narratives, victimhood culture, inheritance metaphor, family silver, performative suffering, cultural belonging, social critique, ritual and identity, generational trauma, satire of grievance

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/12/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/12/26

The Part Kendall Rae Left Out

“The Part Kendall Rae Left Out” is written as a brutal counter-narrative to the sanitized storytelling typical of true-crime media, and its form is deliberately difficult to read. Instead of summary, explanation, or documentary distance, the poem presents a raw block of perpetrator speech, forcing the reader to confront the kind of violence that is usually reduced to a brief line in a case recap. The title signals the poem’s target: the gap between narrated crime and lived crime. By invoking a recognizable true-crime narrator’s name, the poem frames itself as the missing audio—the part that polite retellings cannot reproduce without breaking the conventions of the genre.

Formally, the piece abandons lyrical description and replaces it with transcript-like immediacy. The repeated onomatopoeic sounds, commands, insults, and fragments of dialogue create the effect of overhearing an assault rather than reading about one. This stylistic choice removes the interpretive buffer that normally protects the audience. True-crime storytelling often organizes violence into coherent sequence, motive, and aftermath; here, the reader is trapped inside the chaotic present tense of the act itself. The result is not narrative but exposure. The poem’s refusal to paraphrase mirrors its thematic claim that some realities cannot be responsibly softened without falsifying them.

A central effect of the piece is the dehumanization enacted through language. The perpetrator’s speech is full of slurs, animal comparisons, and taunts that reduce the victim to something less than human. By presenting this language without commentary, the poem demonstrates how violence is sustained rhetorically as well as physically. The insults are not decorative; they are part of the mechanism of domination, transforming the victim into an object on which cruelty can be performed without restraint. In this sense, the poem shows that brutality is not only an act but also a way of speaking, a vocabulary that makes the act feel permissible to the one committing it.

The poem also exposes the gap between public consumption of crime and the reality of suffering. In popular true-crime formats, narration often maintains a tone of composure, even when describing horrific events. Details are selected, ordered, and filtered so that the audience can process them without being overwhelmed. By contrast, this poem insists on the overwhelming. The relentless repetition of sounds and commands denies the reader the comfort of distance. The experience becomes exhausting, which appears to be part of the point: the violence feels endless because, for the victim, it is experienced moment by moment rather than as a summarized incident.

Another important feature is the way the perpetrator’s voice dominates the text. The victim does not speak; the only perspective available is that of the aggressor. This imbalance reflects the reality that acts of extreme violence often erase the victim’s ability to narrate their own experience. At the same time, the poem makes the reader aware of this imbalance by how unbearable the aggressor’s voice becomes. The longer the speech continues, the more the reader feels the absence of any counter-voice, which heightens the sense of helplessness.

The title’s implication is therefore double. On one level, it criticizes media presentations that cannot show the full horror without alienating their audience. On another level, it questions whether the full horror can ever be shown without becoming exploitative itself. By pushing detail to the point of discomfort, the poem walks the line between exposure and excess, forcing readers to confront their own position as spectators. The work suggests that our appetite for true-crime stories depends on a certain amount of editing, and that what gets left out is precisely what makes the events unbearable.

In this way, the poem functions less as a narrative than as a critique of narration. It asks what it means to tell stories about violence for entertainment, education, or awareness, and what is lost when the worst moments must be shortened, softened, or translated into acceptable language. The piece’s harshness is not simply for shock; it is part of an argument about representation, memory, and the limits of what can be responsibly retold.

Meta Description:
A poem presenting the unfiltered voice of a violent assault as a critique of true-crime storytelling, highlighting the gap between narrated cases and the raw reality that media accounts often leave out.

Keywords:
true crime critique, violent language in poetry, narration and brutality, dehumanization, media representation of crime, transcript style poem, shock realism, spectator ethics, voice and power, limits of storytelling

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/11/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/11/26

The Matthew Effect (ROUND 1)

“The Matthew Effect” is a compact poem about projection, prestige, and the human tendency to convert suffering into spectacle. Its title invokes the sociological principle by which advantage accumulates to those who already possess it—“to those who have, more will be given”—and the poem transposes that logic onto the body of a fish. The creature’s face, “studded with rusted hooks,” already bears the marks of repeated capture, which the speaker immediately reads not simply as damage but as distinction. The newest hook “popping through / just under her eye” is both grotesque wound and visual ornament, and that doubleness is central to the poem’s critique.

Once the fish is imagined “as a war general,” the logic of accumulation takes hold. Her old injuries become analogous to medals, signs of endurance, victory, rank. The poem exposes how readily humans aestheticize trauma when it can be narrativized as honor. The phrase “medal-drunk creatures as we are” broadens the indictment beyond anglers or gawkers; it names a species-wide habit of confusing scars with glory and of rewarding those already most visibly marked. The Matthew Effect here is not merely that the fish with hooks gets more hooks, but that prior marks of distinction invite further marking. What already looks decorated becomes a better surface for more decoration.

The final lines sharpen this into satire. Humans are “exaggerators and carnival gawkers,” unable to encounter the fish neutrally once she has acquired symbolic charge. The temptation to “place / a few more before release” reveals a perverse generosity: release is granted, but only after the spectacle has been enhanced. The act is framed as additive, almost ceremonial, as though the fish’s visible burden ought to be completed for the sake of narrative coherence. This is where the poem’s moral force resides. It shows how easily admiration slips into violation when the admired being is treated as an emblem rather than a life.

The poem’s compression is crucial. It does not sermonize about cruelty or anthropomorphism; instead, it lets the transformation happen in real time. A wounded fish becomes a general, hooks become medals, and human observers become a crowd unable to resist intensifying the image they themselves have invented. The result is a bleakly elegant meditation on the way prestige systems work: marks of past survival attract fresh inscriptions, and the already burdened are burdened again because their burden has become meaningful to others.

Meta Description:
“The Matthew Effect” is a brief, incisive poem about a hooked fish whose wounds are mistaken for honors, exposing how humans turn suffering into prestige and spectacle by projecting narratives of rank, heroism, and distinction onto damaged bodies.

Keywords:
The Matthew Effect, prestige and suffering, spectacle, projection, anthropomorphism, war imagery, trauma as decoration, catch and release, poetic satire, accumulated advantage, scars and status

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/10/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/10/26

Driver's Ed FOMO (ROUND 1)

“Driver’s Ed FOMO” is a brief, corrosive satire about incoherence in contemporary attitudes toward adolescent agency, especially where sexuality, reproduction, and adult moral supervision intersect. The poem’s force lies in its speed: it moves from a sociological diagnosis of delayed adulthood, to a deliberately provocative hypothetical about abortion consent, to an image of an underage girl erotically pursuing an older man next door. Rather than arguing discursively, it compresses a contradiction into a single burst of rhetorical pressure.

The opening lines establish the poem’s anthropological frame: “childhood now bleeding / into the thirties.” This is not merely generational complaint but the premise for everything that follows. The poem assumes a culture in which adulthood is delayed, protected, and psychologically deferred far beyond biological maturity. Against that backdrop, the “ninth-grader” becomes a flashpoint. The phrase “in the rare case—extremely rare” is crucial because the poem is not claiming adolescents generally possess robust agency; rather, it isolates the exceptional case in which a young teenager might have “enough / Marian agency to consent / to abort.” “Marian” carries obvious theological resonance, invoking Mary as a figure of adolescent pregnancy, consent, and sanctified maternity. The term therefore folds religious history into modern reproductive politics, suggesting that debates about youthful agency are never free from older cultural archetypes.

The central provocation is the poem’s question: if one grants that this teenager has enough agency to make a grave reproductive decision, why become scandalized by her actively seeking sexual contact with the “retired stick / next door”? The poem’s target is not the permissibility of exploitation by an adult man; it is the selective deployment of agency language. The satire presses on what it sees as a moral asymmetry: youthful decisional capacity is affirmed when it supports one politically or culturally approved choice, then suspended when it would imply sexual initiative of a more troubling kind. The mother’s presence—“boho mom / on board”—sharpens this critique by introducing permissive or progressive adult endorsement. The girl is not acting in a vacuum; she is imagined within a milieu that selectively ratifies some forms of autonomy while panicking at others.

The title, “Driver’s Ed FOMO,” is especially pointed. “Driver’s ed” evokes formal preparation for a threshold of independence, while “FOMO” names the restless anxiety of missing out that defines much of contemporary youth culture. Together they suggest a condition in which young people are symbolically ushered toward autonomy while being psychically trained to feel behind, excluded, or incomplete. In that context, the girl’s “shifting, / grinding” reads not just as sexual behavior but as an enactment of desire under the sign of acceleration—wanting to arrive at adulthood, experience, or danger before being left out of it.

The poem’s rhetoric is intentionally abrasive. It uses the image of the “retired stick / next door” to collapse suburban banality, generational distance, and sexual threat into a single figure. The older man is not romanticized; he appears as a crude emblem of the adult world onto which adolescent desire or projection fastens. That matters because the poem does not resolve the distinction between a young person’s initiative and an adult’s obligation. Instead, it lingers in the discomfort of a culture that wants to talk about empowerment, consent, and bodily autonomy in clean, administrable categories even when actual desire, immaturity, and power gaps remain messy and unstable.

What makes the poem effective is that it is not really about one ninth-grader. It is about a larger cultural confusion over what counts as agency, when it is recognized, and how it is politically distributed. The image of “childhood… bleeding / into the thirties” suggests that society simultaneously infantilizes many adults and selectively adultifies some minors. “Driver’s Ed FOMO” condenses that contradiction into a scandalized question, forcing the reader to confront whether our moral vocabulary is principled or merely situational.

Meta Description:
“Driver’s Ed FOMO” is a satirical poem about selective notions of adolescent agency, linking delayed adulthood, abortion consent, and sexual initiative to expose contradictions in contemporary moral and cultural discourse.

Keywords:
satirical poetry, adolescent agency, delayed adulthood, abortion and consent, sexual politics, Marian imagery, cultural contradiction, youth culture, FOMO, autonomy discourse, moral inconsistency

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/9/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/9/26

MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 70)

This fragment from Made for You and Me 2: hive Being (2017—part 70) continues the mosaic method that structures the larger project: a sequence of compressed observations, aphorisms, and miniature thought-experiments that accumulate meaning through juxtaposition rather than narrative continuity. Each stanza acts as a cell in the “hive,” a brief intellectual or experiential unit whose resonance depends on its proximity to the others. The effect is not argument in the traditional sense but a kind of cultural cross-section, where addiction, technology, sexuality, morality, and loneliness appear side by side as fragments of the same contemporary landscape.

Several of the opening lines confront addiction with stark economy. The line about using one drug “to stay awake” in order to use another simply “to stay well” captures the circular logic of dependency: substances cease to be instruments of pleasure and instead become tools for maintaining equilibrium. Addiction here appears less as indulgence than as maintenance of a fragile physiological balance. The following observation—about the recurring promise to quit “next trimester”—extends this theme into the psychology of deferred reform. The phrase evokes cycles of hope that perpetually relocate the moment of change into the near future without ever arriving there.

Trauma appears in parallel with addiction, suggesting a causal or at least adjacent relationship between suffering and chemical escape. The stark suggestion that drugs become a form of salvation for someone who has endured severe violation illustrates how the poem repeatedly frames substances not merely as destructive forces but as desperate coping mechanisms within intolerable circumstances. This moral ambiguity is typical of the mosaic’s method: it resists clear judgment while forcing readers to confront the conditions that make destructive choices understandable.

The poem then pivots outward to cultural observation. The image of a Tibetan monastery transformed by tourism and erotic spectacle illustrates how globalization and commodification can alter spiritual spaces. The juxtaposition of sacred institutions with sexual curiosity is not simply comic; it suggests the erosion of traditional boundaries when previously isolated cultures become global attractions. Similarly, the stanza about “the grass is greener approach” critiques a contemporary ethos of perpetual comparison and restlessness. In a world structured by fear of missing out, the discipline required to cultivate satisfaction with one’s present circumstances becomes increasingly difficult.

Technological change enters through the line about investing in one’s “interest” rather than merely in wealth. The stanza frames this shift as pragmatic advice in an era shaped by automation and artificial intelligence. If technological systems increasingly outperform humans in routine tasks, then personal passion may become the only reliable basis for meaningful work. The poem thus connects economic transformation with existential stakes: without authentic engagement, individuals risk being displaced both materially and psychologically.

Several fragments examine moral reasoning, particularly where religious or ideological commitments clash with intuitive ethical judgments. The stanza questioning divine commands to slaughter enemy infants highlights a classic philosophical problem: whether moral goodness is independent of divine decree. Similarly, the observation that belief in a deity capable of infinite punishment might be motivated by fear rather than reverence exposes the pragmatic dimension of religious obedience. These moments align the mosaic with long traditions of skeptical philosophy that interrogate the moral consequences of theological systems.

Political critique also emerges through compressed analogies. The line linking the slogan “no one is illegal on stolen land” to the dissolution of private property boundaries extends an argument about logical consistency: if territorial claims are illegitimate at the national scale, the same reasoning might apply at smaller scales as well. The mosaic form allows such arguments to appear briefly without extended defense, inviting readers to supply the reasoning themselves.

Interwoven with these larger reflections are intimate glimpses of ordinary vulnerability. Social media comparisons produce feelings of inferiority; a neighbor’s moan sparks curiosity; a person discovers that “before shots” in transformation narratives may actually depict the aftermath of decline. The closing image—melanoma spots growing unnoticed because no one is present to check a person’s back—distills the fragment’s recurring theme of isolation. Physical health, emotional wellbeing, and moral orientation all depend on relationships capable of noticing what we cannot see ourselves.

Taken together, part 70 illustrates how the mosaic structure allows disparate subjects—addiction, globalization, religious ethics, technological change, loneliness—to coexist within a single conceptual field. The fragments form a kind of intellectual ecosystem in which personal suffering, cultural trends, and philosophical questions continually intersect. Rather than offering resolution, the poem invites readers to move among these fragments and perceive the patterns that emerge from their collisions.

Meta Description:
A mosaic poem fragment from Made for You and Me 2: hive Being (2017—part 70) exploring addiction, trauma, globalization, technological change, religious ethics, and loneliness through a series of compressed aphoristic observations.

Keywords:
mosaic poetry, aphoristic form, addiction cycles, trauma and coping, globalization and spirituality, AI and work, religious ethics, cultural critique, social media comparison, loneliness and health, philosophical fragments

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/8/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/8/26

Seaman Manners (Round 1)

“Seamen Manners” is a critical essay examining H. K. Rigg’s Rigg’s Handbook of Nautical Etiquette and the broader cultural logic of etiquette systems. The essay argues that while Rigg presents nautical etiquette as a collection of practical truths derived from experience, many of the rules function less as objective necessities than as mechanisms for reinforcing social norms, preserving hierarchy, and giving participants a sense of belonging within a tradition that transcends individual lives.

The first major claim developed in the essay is that Rigg consistently frames his prescriptions as rational conclusions that any sensible sailor would reach through experience. The handbook’s tone suggests that etiquette is not arbitrary but grounded in the practical realities of maritime life. Many examples support this framing. Rules about minimizing noise in marinas, tying boats securely so they do not slap in the wind, or passing sailboats with a wide berth clearly contribute to safety and social harmony. These prescriptions resemble hypothetical imperatives: if one wants a peaceful and safe boating environment, then one ought to follow these practices. Rigg’s handbook therefore appears, at least initially, to offer codified wisdom accumulated through long experience on the water.

However, the essay argues that this framing sometimes conceals circular reasoning. Certain prescriptions appear to be justified primarily by the claim that they are simply “proper.” The discussion of christening ceremonies illustrates this point. Encasing the champagne bottle in netting to prevent flying glass is clearly grounded in safety considerations, yet Rigg immediately pairs this with the claim that the bottle should be decorated with braided ribbon. While the first rule has obvious practical justification, the second rests largely on tradition. The justification becomes effectively circular: the ribbon is appropriate because that is how christenings are traditionally conducted. In such cases, the supposed objectivity of nautical etiquette begins to blur with mere convention.

The essay further suggests that some rules serve to maintain social boundaries and preserve existing cultural norms. The discussion of boat names is particularly revealing. Rigg discourages facetious or “contrived” names for fine yachts, recommending instead names that conform to established tastes. While this recommendation might be defended as a matter of aesthetic harmony within the boating community, it also implicitly enforces a cultural standard that privileges the preferences of that community’s dominant members. In a historically homogeneous yachting culture, such norms can operate as subtle mechanisms of exclusion, discouraging expressions that deviate from accepted styles.

The essay also explores the tension between tradition and utility within etiquette systems. Many of Rigg’s most detailed instructions—such as precise rules governing flag placement on different types of yachts—seem less about preventing concrete harm than about maintaining ceremonial continuity. Observing these traditions may indeed foster a sense of shared identity among sailors, but their practical necessity is less clear. Moreover, once such rules are established, violations of them can become sources of irritation or conflict, even though the underlying practice itself is not essential to safety or efficiency.

At this point the essay introduces an intriguing paradox. Rules that originate merely as traditions intended to maintain communal identity may themselves generate discord when others fail to follow them. A yachtsman who has internalized these customs may feel justified in correcting—or resenting—those who ignore them. The etiquette code designed to promote harmony can therefore produce new occasions for tension.

Despite this critique, the essay ultimately acknowledges that such traditions may still serve an important function. Even when particular rules lack strong practical justification, adherence to them can strengthen feelings of belonging within a larger historical community. Nautical etiquette situates individual sailors within a lineage extending far beyond their own lives. By observing these rituals, participants experience themselves as stewards of a tradition that will persist after they are gone.

The essay suggests that this deeper psychological function may help explain why sailors often attach such significance to seemingly minor details of maritime custom. Life at sea has historically exposed sailors to danger, unpredictability, and the ever-present possibility of death. In that context, ritualized behavior can provide stability and meaning. Rigg himself hints at this when he notes sailors’ tendency toward religiosity and superstition. The structured practices of nautical etiquette become a kind of secular liturgy, reinforcing a sense of order and continuity in an environment where human control is often limited.

In this way, the essay concludes that Rigg’s handbook operates on two levels. On the surface it provides practical advice for maintaining courtesy and safety among sailors. Beneath that practical layer, however, it functions as a cultural artifact that reinforces identity, tradition, and purpose within the maritime community. Even rules that appear arbitrary may contribute to the shared narrative through which sailors understand themselves and their place in the world.

Meta Description:
An essay analyzing H. K. Rigg’s Rigg’s Handbook of Nautical Etiquette, arguing that while many nautical rules promote safety and harmony, others function primarily to preserve tradition, reinforce social norms, and give sailors a sense of purpose and continuity.

Keywords:
nautical etiquette, maritime culture, H. K. Rigg, social norms, tradition and custom, etiquette theory, maritime history, ritual and identity, cultural analysis, seafaring community, philosophical critique of etiquette

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/7/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/7/26

Without So Much as a Handoff (ROUND 2)

“Without So Much as a Handoff” is a tightly compressed poem about the psychology of grooming and abandonment from the perspective of a boy who has already been exploited and is now witnessing his replacement. The poem captures the emotional contradiction typical of such situations: resentment toward the younger boy, shame about the past abuse, and a lingering desire to remain the object of the abuser’s attention.

The opening image establishes the narrator’s bodily awareness under the gaze of the adult: “The bus driver’s eyes, / shifting to shorts / your ass had outgrown.” The line marks the narrator’s passage into a sexualized awareness of his own body—not as something he desires, but as something that has been read and used by someone else. The ill-fitting shorts signal both adolescence and exposure: the body has grown, but the social context surrounding it has not adjusted. In grooming dynamics, clothing and posture often become charged objects because they mediate how the adult gaze settles on the child’s body. The poem begins precisely at that moment of recognition.

The second movement introduces the narrator’s expectation of continued contact: “the calls you knew / you would make anyway.” These calls function less as literal communication than as an emblem of the behavioral loop established during the abusive relationship. The boy expects himself to continue reaching out even after the adult has signaled withdrawal. This reflects a familiar psychological dynamic: victims of grooming frequently internalize the relational structure and pursue contact long after the exploiter has begun disengaging. The narrator’s thought—“maybe / this was another test”—reveals how deeply the logic of the abuser has been internalized. The boy interprets rejection not as abandonment but as evaluation, as if the adult’s silence were another hurdle to clear.

The poem’s emotional pivot occurs in the final lines. The bus driver does not address the narrator again. Instead, he turns to “another boy, a thief / too soft to touch a worm,” and casually asks about fishing. The key detail is not the fishing question itself but the redirection of attention. The adult’s gaze and speech have moved on. The younger boy becomes the new center of interest.

The description of the replacement boy is deliberately ambivalent. Calling him a “thief” suggests delinquency or moral judgment, yet he is also “too soft to touch a worm,” an image of childish squeamishness. The narrator perceives him simultaneously as rival and innocent—someone who does not yet understand the role he is being drawn into. This combination heightens the narrator’s jealousy. The younger boy possesses what the narrator once had: the adult’s interest.

The title crystallizes the emotional injury. A “handoff” implies a formal transfer—one person relinquishing responsibility while another assumes it. In this poem there is no such acknowledgment. The narrator is simply dropped. The adult’s attention shifts without explanation or closure. The boy who once occupied that space receives neither recognition nor release.

What makes the poem particularly disturbing is the narrator’s lingering desire to remain wanted. The jealousy directed at the younger boy is not purely protective or moral; it is also possessive. The abused child still aches to be chosen again by the man who discarded him. This emotional residue—the desire for approval from the very person who inflicted harm—is one of the most psychologically accurate elements in the poem. Rather than framing the narrator purely as victim or observer, the poem reveals how exploitation can entangle affection, dependency, and humiliation into a single unresolved longing.

The poem’s restraint is crucial to its power. Nothing explicit is stated. Instead, meaning emerges through glances, omissions, and redirected attention. By withholding overt commentary, the poem places the reader inside the narrator’s interpretive process: watching where the adult’s gaze goes, noticing where it does not return, and realizing what that absence means.

Meta description:
A poem depicting an abused boy recognizing that the adult who exploited him has shifted attention to a younger boy, capturing the jealousy, abandonment, and lingering craving for validation that often follow grooming relationships.

Keywords:
poetry analysis, grooming dynamics, childhood abuse, abandonment psychology, jealousy and replacement, male victimhood, predatory attention, emotional ambivalence, narrative compression, implication in poetry

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

Without So Much as a Handoff (ROUND 1)

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/4/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/4/26

UNO Reverse Card on Deleuze

“UNO Reverse Card on Deleuze” is a brief philosophical satire that uses the logic of a children’s card game—specifically the moment when a player flips the flow of play with an UNO reverse card—to humorously invert a familiar intellectual gesture associated with Deleuzian posthumanism. Rather than celebrating the dissolution of the boundary between human and animal in one direction (“becoming-animal”), the poem proposes a reciprocal movement: if humans are asked to learn animal ways of being, animals might also be expected to adapt to ours. The result is a playful but pointed meditation on domestication, reciprocity, and the limits of ecological humility.

The opening tercet establishes the poem’s central contrast through stark biological imagery. Cats are described as “bird-mauling butchers,” a phrase that strips away the sentimental framing often attached to pets and foregrounds the predatory violence embedded in feline nature. By juxtaposing this with “pet-making primates,” the poem reframes human identity not in terms of mastery over nature but in terms of a peculiar evolutionary and cultural practice: the creation of pets. Humans, in this formulation, are animals whose distinctive niche involves cultivating relationships with other species through affection, naming, feeding, and ritualized interaction.

The middle lines acknowledge a core premise of contemporary ecological ethics: the importance of meeting animals “on their terms.” This phrase gestures toward a widespread philosophical and environmental impulse to respect the autonomy and integrity of nonhuman life. Yet the poem complicates that impulse by reintroducing the realities of human embodiment. Humans, it notes bluntly, “rut and rot”—a reminder that we are biological creatures with drives, decay, and messy physicality of our own. This line resists the idea that ecological humility requires humans to erase their own animal nature or cultural particularity.

The poem’s satirical edge sharpens with the warning about becoming “ecology’s white man.” This phrase invokes the language of cultural critique to suggest a paradox: in attempting to demonstrate moral sensitivity toward nonhuman life, humans might inadvertently perform a kind of exaggerated self-denial or symbolic guilt. The poem implies that ecological ethics can become theatrical if it treats humans solely as offenders who must endlessly defer to the natural world. In this reading, excessive self-effacement risks becoming its own form of posturing.

The closing lines deliver the poem’s “reverse card.” While humans should indeed learn to understand animals, the relationship cannot remain entirely one-sided. Domesticated animals already participate in a shared communicative world with humans: they respond to voices, gestures, routines, and affection. The blunt phrasing—“fuckers have to learn / our ways too”—injects comic irreverence into what is essentially a statement about mutual adaptation. The final image, animals translating “our cutie-pie coos,” grounds the philosophy in everyday life with pets: the soft noises, nicknames, and affectionate speech through which humans build emotional bonds with other species.

In this sense, the poem reframes domestication as a bidirectional translation rather than an oppressive hierarchy or a pure dissolution of difference. Humans shape animal lives, but animals also learn human cues, emotions, and environments. The poem’s argument is therefore not anti-ecological but anti-sentimental: it insists that genuine coexistence requires acknowledging both sides of the relationship—the predatory instincts of animals and the cultural habits of humans.

Through its compact structure and oscillation between philosophical vocabulary and colloquial bluntness, “UNO Reverse Card on Deleuze” compresses a complex theoretical debate into a few sharp lines. The poem’s humor lies in the way it translates abstract intellectual discourse into the familiar dynamics of life with pets: cats hunting birds, humans cooing at them, both species gradually learning each other’s signals.

Meta Description:
“UNO Reverse Card on Deleuze” is a satirical philosophical poem about human–animal relations that flips the logic of “becoming-animal,” arguing that while humans should respect animals’ ways of being, domesticated animals must also learn human habits and affection.

Keywords:
Deleuze satire, becoming-animal, posthumanism critique, human–animal relations, domestication, ecological ethics, philosophical humor, reciprocity between species, pet culture, interspecies communication, satire of theory

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

Willy the Rooster (ROUND 2)

“Willy the Rooster” is a brief poem that achieves its force through the precision of its framing: it captures a single public figure—a habitual street drunk—at the moment when his nightly theater of rage encounters the reflective presence of a schoolgirl. The title primes a reading in terms of animal emblem and ritualized display. A rooster is noisy, territorial, performative, often combative; “Willy” adds a nickname intimacy that both humanizes and trivializes. The poem, however, refuses easy comedy. It uses the rooster figure not to mock but to illuminate how public masculinity can harden into repetitive performance while still containing, unexpectedly, a kernel of shame.

The wino is “wedged midday between / sidewalk and storefront,” a spatial description that makes him seem both stuck and exposed. “Wedged” implies he belongs nowhere—neither inside commerce nor fully outside it—caught in a narrow margin where public life flows past. The poem then expands his identity across time by specifying what he is “clockwork” in doing: as predictable as a freight train, he throws “asphalt / haymakers at streetlamp shadows / in midnight pain.” The phrasing is loaded with contradictions. His punches are “haymakers,” the most dramatic of swings, yet they land on shadows—unfightable enemies, projections. The violence is thus both real (his body swings, his voice shouts) and futile (there is nothing to hit). The adjective “asphalt” converts the urban ground into an agricultural metaphor’s replacement terrain: haymakers made of city grit rather than farm hay, suggesting how rural archetypes of masculine labor and force have been displaced into the street.

The parenthetical “(shouts folding to mumbles)” compresses intoxication’s arc: bravado that collapses into incoherence. The poem’s temporal structure is therefore a hinge between day and night, between public stillness and nocturnal eruption, between the body’s capacity for grand gesture and its collapse into muttering. This suggests that Willy’s aggression is less a stable identity than a cyclical symptom—pain expressed in the only language available to him.

The closing turn—“hides his face before / the mirrors of a passing schoolgirl”—is where the poem’s moral complexity concentrates. The schoolgirl is described not as an object of desire or threat, but as a “mirror,” a reflective surface that confronts him with himself. The plural “mirrors” is telling: it suggests not only her literal eyes but what she represents—youth, innocence, futurity, social order, the possibility of being seen and judged. In the presence of that gaze, he covers his face. This gesture can be read as shame, as self-protection, as the last remnant of dignity. It complicates the rooster persona: the same man who performs violence at night against shadows cannot bear the daylight reflection of a child.

In this sense, the poem becomes a micro-ethics of visibility. The wino’s nightly violence occurs in a space where he can imagine himself unseen or at least unaccountable—fighting shadows, not people. But the schoolgirl’s passing inserts a human witness whose innocence amplifies his self-awareness. The poem thus refuses to romanticize him as a noble outcast, yet it also refuses to reduce him to mere menace. The face-hiding suggests that even in degradation, there can persist a fragile recognition of wrongness or a longing not to contaminate the young with one’s ruin.

The title’s rooster frame deepens this: roosters strut and crow, but they also have a territorial vulnerability—easily startled, easily exposed. Willy’s midday posture is not triumphant crowing; it is concealment. The poem’s achievement is to locate, in a single gesture, the fissure between performative aggression and submerged shame, between public spectacle and private self-knowledge. It leaves the reader with a portrait that is as sociological as it is lyrical: urban pain ritualized into nightly shadowboxing, interrupted by the unbearable clarity of being reflected in a child’s gaze.

Meta Description:
“Willy the Rooster” is a concise poem portraying a street wino who nightly shadowboxes in drunken pain, yet hides his face when a schoolgirl passes—her gaze functioning as a mirror that triggers shame, dignity, and self-recognition.

Keywords:
urban poetry, alcoholism, public masculinity, shame and visibility, street violence as ritual, shadowboxing, social witness, childhood innocence, homelessness, cyclical pain, emblematic title, lyric realism

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/2/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/2/26

A Triptych Titled "Happy Hour" (Round 3)

“A Triptych Titled ‘Happy Hour’” adopts the formal logic of religious painting—three panels, flanking wings and a dominant center—only to replace sacred narrative with domestic implosion. The poem’s ekphrastic structure does not merely describe an imagined artwork; it stages the interpretive act itself. We are positioned as gallery-goers before a moral tableau, invited to read posture, shadow, gesture, and object as theological clues in a secular world.

The right panel frames the janitor in chiaroscuro reminiscent of Rembrandt, invoking a tradition that dignified laborers and sinners alike through dramatic light. Yet the aura here is “muddy,” riverine, unsettled. The yellow glow—suggestive perhaps of both sanctity and sickness—has been diluted into monsoon runoff. The janitor’s body is turned forty-five degrees, a calculated deviation from the classic three-quarter pose. This “inverted” angle becomes a moral metaphor. One side of him is visible, creased with bitterness; the other is withheld, left to speculation. The poem thus encodes ambiguity directly into the geometry of the body. Is the concealed half capable of empathy? The description leaves open the possibility, but it is only “flung hope.” The mop lifted from murky water literalizes the labor of cleaning filth, yet the water’s silt suggests that purification is never complete. He stands between grime and light, worker and threat, figure and shadow.

The left panel shifts into still-life, invoking the tradition of vanitas painting where food and domestic objects signal abundance shadowed by decay. Instead of fruit about to rot or a cat about to disrupt the arrangement, the impending force is a “gnarled fist.” The hand replaces animal instinct with human violence. The food—Colby-Jack cubes, pepperoni rings, port-wine cheese spread, Ritz crackers—constitutes a specifically American vernacular of “happy hour,” modest, processed, convivial. Yet the conviviality is precarious. The fist’s descent toward the paper plate transforms leisure into forewarning. What is meant to be shared becomes a prelude to rupture. The still-life genre traditionally freezes time; here, time is on the verge of shattering.

The center panel, enlarged to double width, gathers and detonates the energies seeded in the wings. We zoom out from the plate to the room, where the domestic sphere reveals its fault lines. A hole in the wall—sized for a fist—signals prior violence, an architectural memory of anger. The chair mid-boot, the janitor’s one-piece uniform airborne, the trajectory of wood fragments toward the woman and child: all of this renders the janitor not as solitary laborer but as volatile patriarch. The chiaroscuro of the right panel now spills into kinetic action. The bitterness glimpsed in profile materializes as force.

The woman and child huddle on a sofa “burned by sleep cigarettes,” a detail that merges neglect, addiction, and exhaustion. The couch itself bears scars; the furniture testifies. The boy’s hand clutching a knife hidden between cushions introduces a counter-current. The knife is both tragic and anticipatory: a child rehearsing defense within a space meant for rest. The poem’s framing implies that this object has been there before, perhaps repeatedly. Protection and escalation are indistinguishable. Violence has colonized the domestic interior so thoroughly that the line between aggressor and defender is blurred.

The title “Happy Hour” becomes deeply ironic. It suggests respite after labor, discounted drinks, communal release. Instead, the panels reveal that the hour of supposed happiness is structurally bound to resentment and eruption. The janitor cleans public spaces yet cannot cleanse his private one. The still-life food gestures toward fellowship but sits beneath a descending fist. The center scene exposes the cost of unvented humiliation and economic precarity transmuted into familial terror.

By arranging these scenes as a triptych, the poem invokes altarpiece iconography. Traditionally, the central panel would depict a salvific event, flanked by saints or donors. Here, salvation is absent. The flanking images provide psychological context—labor and appetite—while the center renders consequence. The viewer is implicated: to stand before the triptych is to confront how easily reverent forms can house profane content. The sacred geometry remains; the sacred promise does not.

Ultimately, the poem suggests that domestic violence is not an isolated eruption but a composition. Labor, shame, hunger, and thwarted dignity accumulate across panels. The janitor’s muddy aura, the gnarled fist, the hidden knife: each is a brushstroke in a larger portrait of class strain and inherited fear. “Happy Hour” thus becomes a meditation on how rituals of relief can collapse into ritualized harm, and how art—by freezing the instant before or after impact—forces us to look at what daily life often teaches us to ignore.

Meta Description:
A scholarly analysis of “A Triptych Titled ‘Happy Hour,’” examining its ekphrastic triptych structure, domestic violence imagery, class tension, and ironic use of religious art conventions to portray labor, resentment, and familial rupture.

Keywords:
triptych poetry, ekphrasis, domestic violence, class resentment, Rembrandt chiaroscuro, still-life symbolism, vanitas tradition, American domestic space, labor and humiliation, paternal rage, art and theology, family trauma, visual composition in poetry

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/1/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 3/1/26

MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 69)

This fragment from Made for You and Me 2: hive Being (2017—part 69) continues the mosaic method by presenting aphoristic shards that oscillate between cultural critique, self-implication, provocation, and bleak humor. As with other portions of the project, the poem functions less as linear argument than as a hive of thought-cells—each stanza a sealed chamber containing pressure, irony, and unresolved tension. Meaning accumulates not by narrative progression but by juxtaposition.

The opening line—“the film character who found the screen by which we view her”—announces a meta-awareness that recurs throughout the sequence. It gestures toward self-consciousness, toward figures who become aware of the frame that contains them. This reflexivity extends to the reader: we are invited to examine the lenses through which we interpret sexuality, power, politics, and morality. The poem persistently destabilizes the vantage point.

Several lines turn on the politics of elevation and hypocrisy. “If who we elevate reflects who we are, we are fucked” reads as both cultural despair and personal indictment. The stanza about the loudest voices chanting “no one is illegal” living in neighborhoods where housing prices enforce borders suggests a critique of symbolic radicalism insulated by material privilege. Throughout, the poem returns to a theme of moral performance versus lived reality—activism that costs little, outrage detached from proximity, rhetoric untested by embodiment.

Sexuality appears not as titillation but as anthropological evidence. The blunt evolutionary claim about “mushroom-headed penises” satirically invokes biological determinism to explain ambivalence, jealousy, and desire. The line about meeting every romantic partner in rehab compresses cycles of addiction and attachment into a single social ecosystem. “Would you still want your type if you healed?” is one of the sequence’s quieter detonations: it reframes attraction as symptom, suggesting that desire itself may be shaped by unaddressed wounds. In this way, sexuality becomes diagnostic rather than decorative.

Some fragments juxtapose brutality with bureaucratic or institutional failure. The image of someone harmed again during the very process meant to document harm condenses systemic betrayal into a single chilling moment. Likewise, “institutional gaslighting” captures a contemporary anxiety about shifting moral frameworks, where accusation and interpretation are entangled with race, power, and spectacle. The poem does not settle these tensions; it leaves them jagged.

Other lines pivot toward paradoxical redemption. “The blessing of incarceration” is deliberately counterintuitive, reframing imprisonment as the first opportunity for real conversation with parents. The statement does not romanticize confinement but exposes how, in certain contexts, constraint can create an enforced pause that ordinary life never allowed. Similarly, “thank God for the mental reprieve of a hobby’s echoes” foregrounds the small mercies that break monotony—the soreness of leg day interrupting the psychic flatness of office labor. Bodily fatigue becomes salvation, a reminder of effort and growth in a mechanized routine.

Across the fragment, a preoccupation with addiction recurs: chemical, sexual, ideological. Drugging a spouse’s smoothie, meeting lovers in rehab, thanking God for distraction—these images sketch a world where compulsion is ambient. The mosaic form mirrors this condition: one thought interrupts another the way cravings interrupt intention. The structure enacts the hive’s hum—constant, overlapping, restless.

The line “the world becomes safe when you realize you could just kill yourself” functions as existential provocation rather than instruction. It invokes a philosophical trope: the paradoxical comfort in recognizing ultimate autonomy. If existence is not compulsory, then fear loses some of its leverage. The fragment’s tonal instability—oscillating between gallows humor, indictment, and sincerity—reflects this existential edge.

Overall, part 69 exemplifies the mosaic’s method: each shard is incomplete on its own yet charged in relation to its neighbors. The poem’s ethic is neither purely condemnatory nor purely confessional. It implicates the speaker alongside the culture it critiques. Desire, ideology, cruelty, and tenderness circulate within the same hive. No fragment is allowed to stand unexamined; each is placed beside another that unsettles it.

Keywords:
mosaic poetry, aphoristic form, cultural critique, hypocrisy and privilege, addiction cycles, sexual anthropology, institutional failure, existential autonomy, ideological performance, trauma and desire, incarceration and redemption, embodiment and labor, self-reflexivity in poetry

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 2/28/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 2/28/26

Neurospicy Fingers (Round 1)

“Neurospicy Fingers” stages intimacy at the level of epidermis. What appears at first to be a small gesture—hands separating so one can drive—becomes a study in shame, compulsion, and the fragile choreography of being touched where one feels most defective. The opening exchange is charged not by overt conflict but by misinterpretation. When she releases his hand and apologizes, he immediately reads the act as revulsion. His reflex is to wipe his palm against his thigh, as if anxiety itself were a residue that must be hidden. The poem is attentive to how quickly the self can narrate rejection into existence. Yet her movement to the center seat, reaching over from above to continue holding his hand, undoes that story. The relief is real—but temporary.

The thumb becomes the site of crisis. Her tracing is described through the metaphor of braille, but a braille reader who is both blind and dyslexic—an image that captures the paradox of hyper-attentive touch encountering surfaces that feel like messages yet refuse to resolve into coherent text. The “snaggy shards of hyperkeratosis” are not merely dermatological; they are tactile evidence of a long, private war. His fingers are rendered as living in “a chronic state of apology.” That phrase reframes bodily damage as moralized. The scabs and bleeding cuticles are not only wounds but confessions—visible markers of something he has failed to master. The pooling blood, the rust crescents on socks and jean pockets, the furtive blotting before interacting with cashiers: all of this builds a portrait of concealment. The body leaks, and the self manages the leak.

The poem treats the compulsion to pick not as grotesque spectacle but as an economy of control. The act is likened to worrying a loose thread—an everyday metaphor that reveals how irresistibly small irregularities can command attention. For someone oriented toward control, unevenness is intolerable. The “micro razors of lift” on what “ought to be smooth” are not minor imperfections; they are alarms. The smoke-detector simile is precise: once triggered, it cannot be unheard. The behavior thus becomes a feedback loop. Picking creates irregularity; irregularity demands picking. Relief is momentary, purchased at the cost of further damage. The poem’s language of “abuse upon abuse” suggests a recursive dynamic: the attempt to correct the flaw becomes the mechanism of its perpetuation.

The psychological layering deepens with the recollection of the Spanish teacher’s warning about cancer and inflammation. Her comment, perhaps offhand in the classroom, becomes lodged as prophecy. For a child already prone to catastrophic thinking—convinced that bodily bumps signal baldness or death—the warning fuses compulsion with mortal risk. Inflammation becomes not just a medical term but a metaphysical threat. The body is imagined as a site where small acts of self-harm might escalate into annihilation. This is the double bind: the behavior soothes anxiety in the moment, yet the warning converts that soothing into further cause for anxiety. The self-medicating act becomes proof of danger.

The final movement of the excerpt reveals the addict’s logic: the promise of “just one more” to even things out. The aspiration is not to destroy but to achieve smoothness—to reach a surface state that would allow cessation. Yet that very aspiration is the trap. The poem’s phrasing—“the picking and biting that will even things out well enough to end all picking and biting”—captures the circular reasoning perfectly. Completion is imagined as the endpoint of compulsion, but the definition of completion keeps shifting. Even the detail about his incisors, worn asymmetrically, testifies to the way the body records repetition. The teeth become instruments reshaped by the very habit they enact.

Within the relational frame, the woman’s tactile attention exposes the vulnerability beneath the ritual. Her thumb reading the damage is both intimate and destabilizing. It threatens to decode what he has worked to conceal. The title’s neologism, “Neurospicy,” gestures toward contemporary language for neurodivergent patterns—sensory sensitivity, self-stimulation, anxiety loops—without flattening them into diagnosis. The poem resists easy clinical categorization. Instead, it dwells in the lived texture of compulsion: the metallic taste of blood, the calculus of concealment, the longing for smoothness, the dread of exposure.

Ultimately, “Neurospicy Fingers” is less about dermatillomania as a symptom than about the ethics of touch. What does it mean to have someone trace the terrain of your shame? To have the very evidence of your private battle examined with patience rather than recoil? The relief he feels when she continues holding his hand suggests that intimacy can interrupt the self’s harsh narrative. But the interruption does not erase decades of habit. The poem leaves us in that tension: between the possibility that another’s steady contact might soften the loop, and the recognition that some battles are etched too deeply into skin and nerve to dissolve in a single gesture.

Meta Description:
“Neurospicy Fingers” explores compulsive skin picking, shame, and intimacy through the tactile moment of a lover tracing damaged cuticles. The poem examines control, anxiety, inflammation, and the self-defeating promise of “one last time” within the lived experience of neurodivergent compulsion.

Keywords:
compulsive skin picking, dermatillomania, anxiety loop, neurodivergence, tactile intimacy, shame and concealment, control and self-soothing, inflammation anxiety, addiction logic, body-focused repetitive behaviors, relational vulnerability, self-sabotage, habit and mortality

Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 2/27/26 Michael Anthony Istvan Junior 2/27/26

Sleep Fissures (ROUND 6)

“Sleep Fissures” is a triptych of belated diagnosis, bodily inscription, and traumatic reenactment in which each numbered part reframes what came before. The poem’s architecture is clinical in one sense—symptoms, causes, aftereffects—but it refuses the fantasy that trauma can be quarantined to a single event or a single register of language. Instead, it shows how harm migrates: from the child’s body to the mother’s household logic, from the adult survivor’s skin into ink, and from ink into adult sexuality and power.

The first section presents a mother confronting a medical mystery with the limited interpretive tools available to ordinary caregiving. “Amoxicillin bottle / four” compresses weeks or months of recurrence into a stark count, suggesting both persistence and escalating frustration. The toddler’s symptoms are rendered in blunt, bodily terms—discharge, fever, vomit—designed to evoke not eroticization but the panic of inexplicable illness. The mother’s response is systematic, almost ritualistic: she “guts / the home of all culprits,” stripping away soaps, bubble baths, foods, clothing. This is a familiar logic of domestic causality: if the child is sick, something in the environment must be poisoning her. The list of eliminated items reads like an inventory of middle-class anxieties about chemicals and hygiene. The final exclusion—“all, save Mr. Malik”—is the poem’s quiet detonation. The one “culprit” not subjected to suspicion is a person, which implies that the mother’s vigilance is both sincere and tragically misdirected. The poem thus dramatizes a basic problem of harm in domestic space: the most dangerous agent is often the one culturally coded as least thinkable.

The second section makes the survivor’s later knowledge literal through tattooing. The adult woman has inked her preschool self onto her body in a way that anatomically aligns the child image with her adult anatomy. The phrasing insists on physical placement rather than metaphor: the tattoo sits below her breasts, and the convergence of the child’s and adult’s genital regions becomes a designed overlap. This matters because it turns memory into cartography. The body is no longer just the site where trauma occurred; it becomes a curated archive, with the survivor acting as both witness and author. The language here is deliberately abrasive because the poem is not describing innocence but its violation, and it refuses euphemism as a moral escape hatch.

The mention of an improvised object—likened to “Gumby” and “plastic”—functions less as salacious detail than as a theory of violence: abuse is often not ritualized sophistication but crude invention, opportunistic use of whatever is at hand, a cruelty that thrives on the child’s pliability. The adult speaker’s adoption of the label “Big Girl” is bitterly ironic. It signals how language used to coerce precocious maturity can be later reoccupied by the survivor as a complex badge—part reclamation, part scar. When the poem says she can “feel—cervix pigging out / on every avatar’s whimpering / load,” it suggests that adult sexuality has become a site where the past echoes through repetition. “Avatar” implies iteration—different men, different encounters, variations on a template—yet the body receives them through the same nervous system that once learned violation before it learned context. Pleasure and compulsion, agency and imprint, are tangled. The culminating perception—“the child in the perp”—introduces a chilling moral complication: the survivor recognizes not innocence in the perpetrator, but damage. It is an insight that can coexist with condemnation. The poem allows the possibility that harm reproduces itself not because it is justified, but because it is contagious.

The third section shifts from inscription and sensation to enactment, and here the poem confronts the phenomenon of traumatic repetition with brutal clarity. The survivor’s “inked thighs” are “in her custody,” a phrase that frames her body as both possessed and guarded—something she now controls, yet something that must be controlled. The depiction of her forcing her body into positions and issuing commands to men is not presented as liberation in any uncomplicated sense. It reads as an attempt to reverse the original power relation: to turn the violated child into the directing adult, to transform passivity into orchestration. Yet the poem refuses to romanticize this reversal. The “cruelties” and the shouted lines reveal how reenactment can reproduce the emotional texture of the original harm even when the adult is, in formal terms, consenting. The men’s degrading talk becomes proof not merely of their participation but of the survivor’s drive to externalize, stage, and master the old script by making others inhabit roles within it.

Across these three movements, “Sleep Fissures” offers an anatomy of misrecognition and aftermath. Part 1 shows how caregivers can diligently chase environmental explanations while missing interpersonal violence. Part 2 shows how adult memory can become literal inscription, collapsing temporal distance on the skin. Part 3 shows how the adult psyche may seek mastery through repetition, testing whether control can neutralize what once happened without it. The poem’s governing insight is that trauma does not end when the event ends; it persists as interpretation, as bodily mapping, as desire, as compulsion, as performance. The “fissures” are the cracks through which the past keeps leaking into the present—during sleep, during sex, during the everyday acts by which a person tries to live inside a body that remembers.

Meta Description:
“Sleep Fissures” is a three-part poem tracing a child’s hidden abuse from misread medical symptoms to adult bodily inscription and traumatic reenactment. Through stark domestic detail and embodied symbolism, it explores delayed recognition, memory as tattooed archive, and the complex afterlives of power and desire.

Keywords:
childhood trauma, hidden abuse, misdiagnosis, maternal vigilance, tattoo as archive, embodied memory, traumatic reenactment, repetition compulsion, consent and power, survivor sexuality, domestic harm, intergenerational damage, post-traumatic desire, poetic triptych

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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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)

Plagues of the Special (ROUND 2)

MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 71)

Polishing the Family Silver (ROUND 1)

The Part Kendall Rae Left Out

The Matthew Effect (ROUND 1)

Driver's Ed FOMO (ROUND 1)

MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 70)

Seaman Manners (Round 1)

Without So Much as a Handoff (ROUND 2)

Without So Much as a Handoff (ROUND 1)

UNO Reverse Card on Deleuze

Willy the Rooster (ROUND 2)

A Triptych Titled "Happy Hour" (Round 3)

MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 69)

Neurospicy Fingers (Round 1)

Sleep Fissures (ROUND 6)

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