A mosaic poem of this scope and ambition makes a claim that is formal before it is thematic: that the appropriate unit for apprehending contemporary American experience is not the argument, the narrative, or even the lyric, but the fragment — the aphoristic jolt, the incomplete observation, the scene left at its own irreducible intensity and placed without explanatory bridge beside what precedes or follows it. "Made for You and Me" — whose title lifts Woody Guthrie's democratic populist claim on the national landscape — proposes that American life in 2017 is best witnessed not from a synthesizing distance but from inside the hive of its unresolved contradictions. The subtitle "hive Being" implies both the collective organism (the hive mind, the national body) and a Heideggerian register, as though the poem is always implicitly asking not "what is America like?" but "what is it to be in America, now, during this?" The "stanzas" designation is itself a formal argument: these fragments claim the status of unified verse-units even as they refuse narrative or argumentative continuity.

The mosaic form has a long pedigree — Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, various miscellany traditions — but this poem makes the form structurally argumentative in a specific way. Each stanza's proximity to its neighbors is a claim, even when no logical connection is asserted. The poem trusts that two adjacent observations will generate meaning between them that neither could produce alone. This is a politics of arrangement: what does it mean that the cremation urn stanza follows the "topless maid" entry? That the yin-yang political stanza precedes the meditation on falling in love with someone lost from youth? The poem refuses to answer these questions. That refusal is its method.

The "topless maid" sequence is the poem's clearest formal demonstration of how the mosaic proceeds. The image appears three times: first as bare observation ("a topless maid"), then with elaboration ("a topless maid still making milk"), then as interrogation ("are topless maids sex workers?"). This is a meditation in installments. The first appearance is pure spectacle — it triggers whatever the reader brings to the image without anchoring it. The second adds lactation, which collapses the erotic and the maternal into a single body. The image cannot be resolved into either register without losing the other; it demands that both be held simultaneously, in discomfort. The third converts the image into a legal and ethical category question with real labor and moral stakes. Read as a triptych, the three appearances model a cognitive process the reader is meant to perform on every stanza in the sequence: encounter, complicate, interrogate.

The conspiracy stanzas form a diptych that accomplishes a complete epistemological argument in two passes. "Ever think the real conspiracy was all the dumb-making conspiracies?" posits an active degradation of public reasoning — conspiracies as instruments for stupefying rather than awakening the population. The later entry deepens the diagnosis: "positing conspiracy helps hide an even scarier reality: widespread incompetence." The first implies intent; the second explains why conspiracy-thinking proliferates even without intent — it is psychologically preferable to attribute systemic failure to a malevolent organizing will than to face the contingent, uncontrollable, humiliating possibility that those in authority are simply not up to the task. Conspiracy, in this reading, is a comfort, not a revelation: it restores the world's legibility at the cost of accuracy. Together, the two stanzas describe a complete ecosystem — one in which dumb-making conspiracies spread precisely because they are more bearable than the truth.

The political stanzas build toward the poem's most explicit ideological thesis, which is unusual for its structural even-handedness. The yin-yang stanza positions neither wing as simply right or wrong: "the right (yang-white) is the guard of custom and excellence / and the left (yin-black) is the guard of progress and the persecuted — / a dot of white stops black chaos; a dot of white stops white tyranny." Each side has a genuine function; each side's excess is its pathology; each contains the corrective it would deny. This is not centrism but dialectic — a model in which the dot of each color in the other's territory prevents the absolutism toward which each naturally tends. The diversity stanza extends this analysis to institutional culture: "excluding diversity — below-the-skin diversity / of opinion and language — on the pretense / of promoting inclusive diversity." The paradox here — that diversity programs can enforce ideological conformity under the banner of inclusion — is among the poem's sharpest observations precisely because it refuses the comfort of a partisan exit. The stanza on the right wing banning art deploys irony to register a historical confusion without resolving it: the poem notes the reversal without declaring a winner.

The stanzas engaging sexual violence require sustained attention to what they are actually doing. The pairing — "feisty enough to need rape ropes even with her tongue nailed to the wall" and "you need no rape restraints when her tongue is nailed to the wall" — forms a dialectic about the relationship between voice and resistance. The first formulation argues that some capacity for resistance is so irreducible that even compounded silencing (the tongue neutralized, speech removed entirely) fails to eliminate the need for physical restraint; the will persists in the body even when its vocal expression is foreclosed. The second formulation inverts this: when voice is sufficiently abolished, physical restraint becomes unnecessary, because the will cannot mobilize the body without the vocalization that activates and sustains it. Read together, the stanzas constitute an argument about what silence does to agency — not about violence as pleasure but about the mechanics of coercion, about where resistance lives in the body and what its suppression requires. This connects to the broader meditation on voice, testimony, and the gag in "Tickle Theory Skepticism": the poet returns consistently to the relationship between speech, will, and power.

"The intrinsic joy of single-point focus on anything — escaping a rapist included" is a psychological rather than moral claim, and a genuine one. Research on flow state has long documented that total concentration produces its own phenomenological reward regardless of the activity's moral content or context. The stanza proposes that this capacity is robust under conditions of extreme duress — that human consciousness can access a form of purposeful clarity even when the circumstances are worst. The provocation is in naming that particular example, which forces the reader to hold the observation against the horror of the situation it illustrates. This is the mosaic's characteristic operation throughout: discomfort in the service of an insight that cannot be reached without it.

The grief stanzas provide the poem's emotional counterweight to its political and philosophical range. "Watching a loved one — just in their face, / their eyes — accept that you will not survive / before you yourself have accepted it" achieves exact devastation in its rendering of terminal witness: one's own death perceived first as an external fact in another's expression, before the self can assimilate what the face has already accepted. The estrangement is doubled — death arriving first as an object of observation in someone else, and only later, if at all, as a subjective fact. The father's mound stanza achieves a comparable precision through temporal layering: the current graveside visit occasions a memory of visiting grandparents' graves together with the now-interred father, so that the speaker stands at multiple generations of mortality simultaneously. The cremation urn stanza deploys a child's literal-minded innocence — the body's reduction to an unrecognizable volume — to open what funeral ritual forecloses. The laughter is "contagious even in this darkest hour" precisely because the child's question bypasses the ritual management of grief and arrives at the body's actual fate.

The stanza about children whispering in the aftermath of parental violence — "children stuck whispering for hours / in the wake of a parental spat that dipped / into screams and shattered glass" — appears verbatim in "Crank Shaft," establishing the relationship between the mosaic poem and the companion prose pieces as generative rather than merely archival. The mosaic provides the image; the prose activates it within a specific consciousness and scene. The image means differently in each context — in the mosaic, it is a freestanding observation about children's embodied response to adult volatility; in "Crank Shaft," it describes the uncanny neighborhood silence after a child's death — yet carries its full prior charge into its new context. This is not recycling but ecology: images circulate between forms, accumulate additional valences, and retain their original compression.

The poem's final stanza is its most volatile, and its argument demands unflinching engagement. The stanza links medical racism — the documented phenomenon of physicians undertreating Black patients' pain — to what it identifies as the chilling effect of racial accusation on cultural criticism. The argument is that in an era when criticizing what the poem calls "hyperviolent-hypersexual poisons of black culture" risks the accusation of racism, a broader reluctance to engage critically with race can produce perverse effects in clinical practice, enabling assumptions about differential pain tolerance to go unchallenged. The logical chain is real: social sanction of a category of discourse can generate avoidance with consequences in adjacent domains. What the stanza risks — and this is a genuine risk the poem does not fully audit — is that its critique of certain cultural products becomes available as cover for wider chauvinism, that the charged phrase "hyperviolent-hypersexual poisons" carries its own freight of prejudgment that the stanza's argumentative structure does not examine. The poem does not resolve this tension. It creates it, and places it at the end of a sequence, where it cannot be absorbed by what follows. This is either the poem's most honest moment — a willingness to end on an unresolved and genuinely difficult problem — or its most exposed. Probably it is both.

Formally, the 2017 stanzas resist any single organizational principle. Length varies from a single image-cluster to a sustained tercet; subject matter ranges from the cosmological (Jesus as metaphor for stellar nucleosynthesis) to the micro-social (shoplifting CDs in youth to sell them back). Tone shifts without announcement — dark humor, philosophical inquiry, erotic observation, political satire, elegy appear in sequence without tonal bridge. Yet the poem maintains a consistent pressure: a single intelligence scanning the full bandwidth of contemporary experience with an attention that neither aestheticizes nor retreats. "Listening is a gift of recognizing the other's existence" earns its place in the sequence because the poem has performed the claim across every preceding entry — attending, across a wide range of subjects and registers, to the full texture of what it means to exist in America in 2017, without deciding in advance which existences warrant the most serious consideration.

What "Made for You and Me" is doing — and what the mosaic form makes possible — is something different from cultural criticism and different from lyric witness: it is an attempt to render a cultural moment as it actually presents itself to a mind moving through it, in fragments, without the retrospective coherence that narrative imposes. The hive does not explain itself. It hums.

Meta Description

A mosaic poem anatomizing American cultural experience in 2017 through aphoristic fragments — spanning grief, sexual violence, political epistemology, medical racism, dark humor, cosmology, and race — that generate meaning through juxtaposition rather than argument, refusing synthesis while maintaining the consistent pressure of a single intelligence scanning its total environment without deciding in advance what deserves the most serious attention.

Keywords

Made for You and Me, hive Being, mosaic poem, aphoristic poetry, American cultural criticism, political epistemology, conspiracy theory poetry, racial pain bias, diversity paradox, yin-yang politics, flow state, grief and dark humor, mosaic form poetics, contemporary American poetry, 2016–2020 poetry, cultural fragment poetry, intertextual poetry, voice and coercion, Trump era poetry, aphorism and witness

“MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 84)” operates less as a lyric sequence in the conventional sense than as an accretive ontology of modern consciousness. The poem does not proceed by argument, narrative, confession, or image-patterning in the ordinary lyric mode. Instead, it advances through abrupt juxtaposition: aphorism, anecdote-fragment, political observation, bodily memory, speculative philosophy, vulgar joke, sociological aside, traumatic flash, and metaphysical proposition arranged in a flattened textual field where no single utterance is granted final hierarchical authority. The result resembles a consciousness attempting to think under conditions of informational oversaturation without surrendering either moral seriousness or libidinal candor. What emerges is a poetics of swarm cognition: the individual mind revealed as a hive through which cultural residue, instinct, historical violence, technological anxiety, erotic memory, and speculative abstraction ceaselessly circulate.

The title “hive Being” is therefore exact. It invokes both Heideggerian ontology and insect collectivity, suggesting a form of existence in which subjectivity is neither sovereign nor singular but composed of competing drives, inherited scripts, social contagions, and intrusive perceptions. The poem’s speaker does not present a stable self reflecting upon the world from critical distance. Rather, the self appears as a site through which fragments of civilization think themselves aloud. The stanzaic units feel less authored than intercepted. This gives the poem its distinctive pressure: one senses not crafted epigram alone, but consciousness struggling to metabolize the unbearable simultaneity of modern experience.

The opening line, “the first pussy fart on Earth,” immediately establishes the poem’s refusal of decorum as a philosophical method rather than mere provocation. The line collapses evolutionary history, sexuality, comedy, shame, and origin myth into a single absurd speculative image. It asks the reader to imagine the emergence of embarrassment itself: the moment bodily contingency first became socially legible. The joke is cosmological. Human civilization is reduced to an animal acoustics that nevertheless carries symbolic charge. The line therefore introduces one of the poem’s central obsessions: the impossibility of separating the lofty operations of culture from the humiliating materiality of embodiment.

This concern intensifies in the next stanza: “infant suckling forced into clitoral grammar—what more explosive semiotic violence?” Here the poem moves from scatological comedy into psychoanalytic horror. The phrase “clitoral grammar” reframes infantile nourishment through the language of sexuality and signification. “Grammar” is crucial because it positions desire not merely as instinct but as syntax: the body inducted into systems of meaning before consent, consciousness, or selfhood exist. The violence named here is “semiotic” because subject formation itself becomes coercive. The infant does not merely enter language; it is eroticized by the structures through which dependence is organized. The line recalls psychoanalytic accounts of polymorphous sexuality, Kristevan theories of abjection, and Lacanian claims regarding entry into the symbolic order, yet the poem’s diction remains aggressively corporeal, preventing theory from sublimating the body into abstraction.

That oscillation between abstraction and vulgarity governs the sequence as a whole. One moment the poem contemplates lifespan extension and the psychological burden of near-immortality; the next it fixates on “that plink of a beer can BB-gunned off a fence.” The juxtaposition is not random. The poem repeatedly demonstrates that cognition itself is structured associatively rather than hierarchically. Minor sensory memories coexist with civilizational anxieties because consciousness does not sort experience according to philosophical dignity. A sound can haunt the psyche with as much persistence as metaphysical dread.

The stanza concerning long-lived humans is especially revealing:

“think of the struggle that people who will live into the hundreds
(five hundred, maybe even a thousand)—think of the struggle
they are bound to have with mortality, the daily haunting of it”

The paradox here is devastating. Longevity does not weaken mortality-consciousness; it intensifies it. The longer one lives, the more death becomes imaginable as theft. Mortality ceases to appear “natural” once technological civilization begins extending the temporal horizon beyond inherited biological expectation. The poem therefore anticipates a specifically posthuman neurosis: not fear of premature death, but terror generated by the expansion of possible life itself. Psychoanalytically, one might say the death drive becomes more oppressive precisely when survival becomes more plausible.

Throughout the sequence, ethical observation is treated with equal skepticism toward innocence and cynicism. Consider the lines:

“seeing a Jew or a Muslim manipulate others for personal gain—our extra fury speaks
not only to the hypocrisy but to our naive myopia”

The poem risks offense in order to diagnose a deeper structure of moral fantasy. The outrage directed toward hypocrisy emerges not merely from ethical disappointment but from a desperate wish to believe certain identities or belief systems can transcend competitive appetite altogether. “Religions, no less than ants, carve turf” collapses spiritual idealism into biological territoriality. Yet the poem does not simply reduce religion to animal struggle. Rather, it reveals the human need to deny our continuity with struggle. The line attacks not faith alone, but the narcissistic fantasy that any collective identity escapes predation.

This suspicion toward moral purification recurs elsewhere. The stanza on Confederate statues is particularly nuanced:

“graffitiing the confederate statues is way better than tearing them down—
the racist persons depicted surely would like neither, but one thing is clear:
the racist logos running through each of them begs for them to be torn down”

The passage stages an internal argument rather than a stable position. Graffiti preserves visibility while contaminating authority; destruction risks historical erasure while refusing continued veneration. The key word is “logos.” Racism here is not merely personal prejudice embodied by historical figures but an organizing rationality coursing through the monument itself. The statue becomes ideology petrified into civic form. Yet even as the poem condemns that logos, it remains fascinated by symbolic transformation rather than simple removal. Desecration becomes semiotic warfare.

Again and again, the poem returns to systems that sustain themselves through managed suffering. “best for profit is for treatment to go on for life” condenses an entire critique of pharmaceutical capitalism into one flat declarative sentence. The nearby image of “a dialysis center in almost every strip mall” extends this critique spatially. Chronic illness becomes infrastructural. The landscape itself begins to resemble a diagram of managed biological dependency. Yet the poem avoids rhetorical inflation. Its power comes from understatement: the casual observation made unbearable by its familiarity.

The sequence’s psychoanalytic intelligence emerges most strongly in its treatment of familial memory and defensive narration. The lines:

“as an excuse to keep on having
her excuse, her story had to be
that we were all mean to her”

reveal identity as retrospective self-justification. The repeated “excuse” suggests that psychic survival often depends less on truth than on narratable injury. Likewise, the memory of “your mother dragging pajamaed you / throughout the city in search of him” transforms adultery into childhood theater. The phrase “the whoremaster fuck” is grotesquely excessive, almost comic in its rage, yet from the child’s perspective it becomes primordial linguistic trauma: sexuality encountered as pursuit, humiliation, accusation, and instability.

Humor itself appears throughout the poem as an unstable threshold between intimacy and cruelty:

“typically the better you are
at being funny, the closer you come
to tipping over into meanness”

The insight is psychologically acute because comedy depends upon controlled aggression. Wit derives energy from violation: embarrassment, exposure, incongruity, superiority, timing. The funniest person in the room often possesses the sharpest instinct for weakness. The poem recognizes that humor and sadism share structural proximity. To make others laugh is often to demonstrate mastery over vulnerability.

Alcohol, meanwhile, is described not in terms of escape but temporal belonging:

“the sweetness of alcohol, how
it allows even the most neurotic
to be present—to belong to now”

This is one of the sequence’s gentlest moments. Presence appears not as enlightenment but pharmacological relief from recursive self-consciousness. The neurotic subject experiences ordinary temporality as exclusion from immediacy. Alcohol briefly repairs that exclusion by quieting metacognition. The phrase “belong to now” is especially moving because it implies that sober consciousness often feels exiled from the present tense.

The stanzas concerning mortality and nonhuman consciousness extend the poem’s ontological scope beyond the human. The claim that people deny animal mortality-awareness because “funerals are necessary for such awareness” exposes the anthropocentric absurdity of demanding symbolic ritual as proof of interiority. The poem repeatedly resists human exceptionalism. This resistance culminates in the final stanza:

“our dreams of the foreign might suggest
a beyond to our horizons, but that beyond
need not be beyond the natural world”

The ending refuses both reductive materialism and supernatural consolation. Human longing for transcendence may indeed indicate realities beyond current understanding, but the poem declines metaphysical inflation. Mystery does not require the supernatural. The unknown can remain immanent. This is characteristic of the poem’s broader intellectual posture: anti-sentimental without becoming spiritually flat.

Formally, the poem’s fragmentation performs the very hive-consciousness it theorizes. There is no privileged center from which meaning radiates outward. Instead, significance emerges through accumulation, collision, and tonal whiplash. The reader is forced into an active interpretive role, constructing continuity across discontinuity. This creates a peculiar phenomenological effect: reading the poem feels less like following a speaker and more like inhabiting a cognition.

The poem’s syntax contributes to this effect through strategic compression. Many stanzas operate as compressed thought-events rather than complete arguments. The line breaks produce hesitation without lyric softness. They mimic cognition interrupting itself, revising itself, leaping laterally before emotional stabilization can occur. The result resembles notebook philosophy contaminated by dream residue, internet overload, vulgar humor, political despair, and bodily memory.

What ultimately distinguishes this sequence is its refusal to partition human existence into separate domains. Politics bleeds into biology; comedy into cruelty; eros into infancy; metaphysics into strip malls; ontology into family trauma. The poem understands consciousness as fundamentally contaminated by simultaneity. One cannot think mortality without also thinking commerce, sexuality, boredom, violence, medication, ideology, and animality. The hive is not collective harmony but crowded cohabitation inside the mind.

“hive Being” therefore becomes a poem about modern psychic life after the collapse of stable metaphysical shelter. It does not mourn that collapse nostalgically, nor celebrate fragmentation as liberation. Instead, it inhabits fragmentation as the actual phenomenology of contemporary thought. The self emerges as porous, overrun, unable to prevent the circulation of inherited language, cultural debris, historical guilt, bodily absurdity, and speculative terror. Yet the poem’s very act of arrangement constitutes a counterforce against dissolution. The fragments do not resolve into system, but they do achieve pressure, rhythm, recurrence, and conceptual resonance. In that sense, the poem transforms psychic overload into form without pretending to cure it.

Meta Description

A philosophically and psychoanalytically inflected mosaic-poem sequence exploring embodiment, mortality, symbolic violence, ideology, humor, family trauma, posthuman anxiety, and the swarm-like fragmentation of contemporary consciousness.

Keywords

mosaic poetry, hive consciousness, psychoanalytic poetics, semiotic violence, fragmentation, posthumanism, mortality anxiety, embodied cognition, symbolic order, aphoristic poetry, ontological dread, libidinal theory, ideological critique, contemporary long poem, swarm subjectivity, trauma and memory, vulgar materialism, consciousness studies, modern alienation, philosophical poetry

“MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 83)” continues the project’s distinctive method of aphoristic collage, assembling philosophical provocations, social observations, grotesque humor, and existential reflections into a cumulative portrait of human contradiction. As in prior installments, the sequence does not proceed by linear argument so much as thematic resonance: fragments echo, refract, and contaminate one another until a broader anthropology emerges. This installment is especially concerned with the tension between performance and sincerity, consolation and self-deception, and the ways human beings metabolize suffering into systems of meaning, ritual, and identity.

A major through-line here is the instability of emotional authenticity. “bothered for years by not crying at the funeral” captures how grief becomes self-surveillance: the mourner worries not only about loss but about whether the proper signs of loss manifested. Likewise, “ashamed that you pray” compresses modern secular embarrassment and spiritual longing into a single line. Throughout the sequence, emotional life appears inseparable from reflexive self-consciousness, as though no feeling can remain innocent of interpretation.

The installment repeatedly examines compensatory or adaptive illusions. “a post-trauma need to stick / to something—anything—while chances still remain” is psychologically sharp because it frames attachment less as conviction than survival strategy. Similarly, the line about “presenting opportunities only to those thought likely to follow through” identifies a hidden social sieve: confidence and prior legitimacy become prerequisites for receiving further possibility, creating recursive systems of advantage and exclusion.

Several entries interrogate communal narratives around morality and suffering. “we thank God for saving the one girl from the bloody rubble, not for the earthquake” is particularly effective because it exposes selective attribution in religious gratitude. The line quietly questions why divine agency is credited for rescue but not destruction. Likewise, the final observation about believers assuming Christ’s return will occur according to their own time zone brilliantly skewers the hidden narcissism embedded even within supposedly cosmic eschatology.

This installment is especially strong when exploring the social mechanics of exclusion and attraction. The fragment about the gregarious woman excluded from the group because others sensed “something sour under that sugar” is psychologically nuanced. The issue is not simple falseness, but overinvestment: affection experienced as acquisitive rather than free. “every grin and hug aimed / to win over any part of them” identifies a subtle social desperation people often detect intuitively before they can articulate it.

Likewise, “asking her why she will not even give you a chance—that might be involved” is wonderfully compressed social psychology. The very act of demanding romantic consideration becomes evidence against deserving it. The line succeeds because it trusts implication rather than explanation.

A recurring concern throughout the sequence is the tension between performance and reality. “having to remember which mask to wear with what person” treats identity as situational modulation rather than unified essence. The future-oriented observation that prophets may eventually “make a showcase out of their imperfections” extends this concern into media culture, suggesting that total visibility transforms vulnerability itself into performance capital.

Mortality and bodily decline continue to haunt the sequence. “board games, cards, crotchet for the boring parts of a loved one’s dying” is devastating precisely because it acknowledges the mundane temporality of deathwatching. The line refuses sentimental compression, recognizing that prolonged dying contains stretches of banality no less real than moments of sorrow. Similarly, “bettered, at least for a period, / by dementia’s power to free you / from regrets and grievances” captures the morally disorienting possibility that cognitive decline may relieve psychic suffering.

The installment also returns repeatedly to institutional and ideological skepticism. The “fat glorification” fragment is particularly layered. It initially appears to satirize body-positivity rhetoric, but then pivots toward cynical speculation about pharmaceutical timing and market incentives. The target becomes not merely cultural attitudes toward weight, but the entanglement of ideology, commerce, and delayed technological salvation.

One of the sequence’s deepest philosophical tensions appears in the lines about artificial intelligence inheriting humanity’s metaphysical labor. The possibility that asking “what is this place and what are we doing here?” may cease to be uniquely human reframes existential inquiry itself as something potentially outsourceable. The poem recognizes both the temptation and the loss embedded in that prospect.

The ayahuasca fragment is another standout. Its “jump-cut imagery” acknowledges the artificiality of psychedelic revelation while insisting that fabricated or hallucinatory presentation need not invalidate moral insight. The bigot’s revelation concerning his houseplant’s ancestral care expands moral imagination across evolutionary and ecological continuity.

Formally, the collage structure remains highly effective. The rapid movement between theology, sex, illness, childhood, philosophy, shame, and absurdity mirrors consciousness itself: associative, unstable, layered. Meaning emerges not through transition but through accumulation and juxtaposition.

Ultimately, this installment of “hive Being” presents humanity as a species perpetually improvising between humiliation and transcendence, sincerity and theater, appetite and meaning. Its fragments repeatedly expose the hidden psychological mechanics beneath ordinary social and spiritual life while still preserving a strange sympathy for the creatures caught inside those mechanisms.

Meta Description:
An aphoristic collage-poem exploring shame, mortality, religion, performance, social exclusion, existential anxiety, and the hidden psychological mechanics shaping human behavior.

Keywords:
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2, hive Being, aphoristic poetry, existentialism, religion, shame, mortality, social psychology, philosophy, poetic analysis