Two New Poems

Tired Cyborg

This morning I woke up
with a crink
in my neck
I figured it was due
to my exhaustion

That I simply slept
so deeply
that my body
Was too tired to re-position itself
in the night.

I once woke up during the night
When I was a boy
With both arms totally asleep;
no blood was flowing from them.
This made me laugh.

It felt like one of those anti-gravity machines
that make your whole body numb.

Lately, when my body falls asleep,
it's harder to bring it back,
to re-circulate the blood.

See
I’ve been burning the candle
at both ends, lately

Why do we use the candle metaphor
for describing
a state we aren’t able to identify
as being on the brink
of “burned out?"

Maybe by burning the candle at both ends
we’re just strengthening
our capacity
for never becoming burned out?
Or maybe
we’re just building
an immunity
to never becoming burned out?

St. Augustine comments,

“the mind commands the body and it obeys.
The mind orders itself and meets resistance.”

The body is the instrument of the mind,

yet the mind is elsewhere.

The mind is precarious
in its control
over the body,
like a computer
in relation to the data
it outputs.

My body can only be measured by its outputs,
not its intentions or efforts.
This is how the computer
has enveloped
our idea of performance.

And by performance,
I'm referring to the performance of a system
And not just any system,
for what is a system
if its parts are isolated
from its whole?

Without the function of a system
in its whole,
would my body
still be free enough
to be separate from the pressure
of having to simply perform
its output(s)

for the machine?
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The Ambivalence of Sight

The “scopic drive” is tied both to delusion and to truth
In nature, each object is presupposed
to possess two natural properties,
that are either good or evil.

Such is the thought that has absorbed our imagination,
but our philosophy has surpassed this common understanding.
But why would it matter
if our collective imagination still perceives objects in this way?
What good is knowledge
if it is not addressing these realities?

So if the natural properties are inhabited by certain auspicious and non-auspicious qualities,
then what of the objects themselves?

What are the objects made up of?

Take the gun.
The gun is just like any other object.

And like all objects,
it has a certain indifference
to its user and its observer.
So it isn't nature that gives the object its dualism.
It is the participant
and the observer.

In object relations theory,
the difference between the perspective of the participant
and the observer
is the basis
of your subjectivity

And in the incorporation of the gun
into my field
of sight
I understand
that the gun
is really the object,
not of veneration
but of pure evil.
But I understand this
through my understanding of the indifference
of the object,
the object is made up
of a non-existence.

After all,
our desire
to associate
the two properties
are rooted in a concept of the self
that we incorporate into each object.

The gun has changed the way
our object relations are constituted.

A problem the metaphysics
for which
has yet
to be developed.