Technical Poetry
evil works like bitcoin mining where the power needed to fight it doubles
after a certain amount has been unearthed
relationships are like banging out some computer code
there are very few ways for it to succeed
but infinite ways it can fail
i’m like an A13 micro processor
but i can’t shut down my high powered cores
like religious people can when thinking about their faith
your brain is like a folder on a computer
people tell you the memories are ordered by date
but you know they are ordered by most recent access
wisdom without power
is like being locked out of your bitcoin fortune
a brain on mental illness
is a solid state drive
that degrades just a little more
with each write
hope takes up more space in your brain
but despair drains the battery quicker
the brain is like a nuclear reactor
it possesses awesome power
both in your service
and when in meltdown
(all religions involve taming the brain
just like technologies involve taming fire)
trying unsuccessfully to tap into God’s strength
is like a cell phone trying to reach a distant tower
the battery gets killed pretty fast
evil as heat
incarnation as humidity
the wet bulb temperature is what kills you
these are fighting words of the defeated
I was writing a friend about how what happened in my worst traumas sticks with me. The trauma itself obviously does but what the results of your gasping for something factor in as well. I found out after an incident where I thought my dad was going to kill me when I was 16 that the image of God I had built in my head was completely AWOL. When things are at their absolute worst what is is goes right out the window, only what is actually experienced in the moment matters. This is hard for people who haven’t suffered deeply to get their head around. Religion didn’t help me when I needed it to then, it didn’t when I had eye problems in 2002, and it doesn’t now even though it is shoved down my throat.
One of the things those selling suffering tell you is it will turn you into more of an everyman. Maybe it’s true for some and especially for those who get past the gatekeepers of being published (and the act of being published in and of itself means you almost certainly watered down your experience to appease someone who suffered less than you) but it isn’t for me. The simple answer is that negative symptoms have eaten a lot of parts of myself away. And while that explains some of it it doesn’t explain all of it. People are whole in a single way but are broken in manifold ways. You’d think because of skyrocketing depression rates that people would be able to be attuned to each others worlds but a lot of the time it isn’t the case. People are islands experiencing their own individual hells and the modern psychology sanctioned hyper individualism (exacerbated by COVID) isn’t helping things any. Part of mitigating depression is just being with people and having common experiences with them (so you have things to talk and joke about). Otherwise our lives remain fragmented and balkanized. My experiences are so alien to even my closest friends and family that a lot of times I’m just talking past them. Losing friends means I live in my head that much more and this drives me further and further away from people. Obviously a good portion of the reason people scorn me is I don’t have the “life gems” like good jobs, nice houses, fancy degrees, nice cars, etc.. but that doesn’t explain all of it.
One of the things I have noticed recently is people don’t like it when you call them a liar. They especially don’t like it when you let your life speak and it calls them a liar. Just having a visible disability means that every interaction with the abled world is seen as an incursion and every interaction makes people question their false notion that people have innate worth as they judge me as worthless.
Intersectionality is thorny
Intersectionality is thorny in ways that both sides of the conservative/liberal divide don’t appreciate. Intersectionality refers to the idea that when someone is a member of more than one marginalized group their experience is a singularity to people who only belong to one of said groups. The analogy of a street intersection is used. If someone is both black and disabled they can get hit via either street but they wouldn’t necessarily ascertain whether it was one or other or a combination of both. The point is that like medical comorbidities, belonging to more than one marginalized groups adds up to more than the sum of its parts.
I am someone with both a physical disability and mental illness and the two have added up to more than the sum of their parts because if just one part of you is broken then you lean heavily on the parts of you that are still whole. But if more parts are you can’t do this, for example with me being a social mentally ill social moth needing company my physical disability makes it so I can’t drive to force myself on people to befriend.
What makes intersectionality more thorny than either side of the divide will admit is the fact that every way someone is has advantages and disadvantages similar to chemical compounds interacting where they can produce novel reactions. Case in point the black male. Maleness is no gravy train even if you’re white but what muddies the waters is the fact that the males feminists focus on as the patriarchy are the top 20% of men. If you just take those and ignore everyone else then yeah men are doing great. However when you start looking further down, particularly at the bottom 50% of males, a darker picture emerges. Males in this cohort of every race suffer because the three things that hit men harder are poverty, not having a father or father figure, and inability to control their anger. Now imagine being a black male, adding racism, Jim Crow, and police brutality to all of this. The intersectionality of blackness and maleness actually becomes worse than the sum of its parts because the parts of maleness that manifest themselves in men further down actually hurt them and this is amplified by the fact that aggression is actually punished more severely if you’re black not to mention the bias in the legal system.
A female walking through a store will be be ignored, a poor white male will be watched while a black male may be accosted. Anti male and anti black bias come together in multiple to make things worse. Women of all races get treated much better than men in the legal system (though it’s the worst for black men).
It’s politically incorrect to be a men’s rights activist but I think this angle can help us understand racism better.
Yup…. more poetry
if kindness truly mattered
men on dating sites would lie about their character more often
than their height and income
God is gravity
dispense with him
and you will have to find which direction “up” is
the difference between a deep conversation and venting
is your level relative to the other person you’re engaging
i have a photographic memory for embarrassing incidents
because a lot of them explain
why i’m no longer in the picture
it’s rude for Christian friends I was close to ghosting me
but it’s also rude for me to live a life
that screams “everything you believe is a lie”
my soul is so small
it doesn’t have space for all the sadness
so I compress it and store it as anger
taking an ssri anti depressant is like lighting a match on the john
it keeps you from smelling the shit you keep taking from assholes
forgiveness is nice
but the people who end up doing it
are almost always on the bottom
to the negative 490’th power
disability is a Christ buster
just letting your life speak
living an unvarnished disability existence
is enough to make Christians’ brains do a backflip
the quality of information you receive
is commensurate with your place in society
(that’s why a social worker at the indigent clinic
will tell you email reply time isn’t indicitive of someone’s concern for you
but the CEO of Google will say the opposite)
my brain works scientifically by default
if you want it to work any other way
you have to get me to play a cognitive trick
which i have to be unaware i’m playing
lest it be torn apart
most of therapy’s tools only work
when you have extricated yourself from an abusive situation
just like a hammer can nail new boards together
but can’t make anything out of a pile of rubble
abusers are like gas giants
their gravity’s so strong you get sucked in
and your ability to escape
is inversely proportional to how near you are to them
they bend everything in the solar system around them
and even things far away like portentous comets
are flung with their tug
life is mostly drudgery
not being treated like shit is what makes it worth living
and there is a lot less of that happening
if you happen to have a disability
once you can’t trust yourself
you can’t trust God
because trusting God necessitates
being able to trust yourself
Speech
I sat through a rather boring Biden address and I couldn’t be happier. Boring is good, it means things are trending back to normal. The stimulus was basically throwing money everywhere which I think was needed even if people on the right didn’t think so. I also think the child poverty alleviation measure in it was the most important part of the bill. Imagine how much better mental health children will have when their parents aren’t worrying about their next meal.
I’m actually super grateful the left took power even as I don’t agree with a lot of their worldview. They believe in healthcare which to me is an obvious thing to believe in but people on the right don’t think so for some odd reason.
you didn’t ask for more poetry and we delivered!
calibrate your hate!!!!
the protestant Vatican hates those of us with disabilities
that is why they are speaking over us
to shore up the narrative
because left unvarnished
disability works like an armor of God piercing bullet
through the faith
more than we are led to believe
is a zero sum game between self and other
it’s the volume dial on your stereo
the louder it goes the more pleasure you get
at the expense of the people downstairs
who tell you to turn it down
the less market value you possess
the harder socializing is
because you don’t possess the life gems
like houses, good jobs, and SO’s
that are fodder for polite conversation
so you are invisible
we can determine where a black hole is
by observing the stars that disappear into it
just like we can determine the fallout of a confidence
by the drawing away that often happens afterwards
i wish i could take a mental health day
where my brain takes a vacation from self-thinking
(I think that’s why people like me
are usually hooked on drugs and alcohol)
my heart burns like the grassland
my mind burns like the forest
my soul burns like the swamp
…and MISC PHRASES
let the sky do its thing
we are all finger puppets on God’s hand
what do i say to the wolf?
the sinner and the sin like the conjoined twins
(not separating)
i want to kill myself almost as much as God does
all i care about is the way i feel
it’s better not to know
i study poison for a living (psychology)
no time to lick your wounds
baby there’s no way out
life is larger than me
knowing tomorrow is going to be worse
you didn’t want more poetry… but that’s what you’re getting!
it’s going to take me four years to recover from a Trump presidency
which is the time we’re being given a break
between his two terms in office
when Trump was acquitted
God was aSTARTED
heeez ready to make some head-way
BOOM!
the more sparingly you meet out validation
the more people take stock in it
when it is given
statisticians are trying to tell us
young people are dying of suicide
but in reality
they’re dying of an allergic reaction
to septic late stage capitalism
the thing you can take away from people
that will do the most long term harm
is hope
do Christians and Muslems worship the same god
**checkes if they hate gays**
YUP
yeah they do
it’s up to us
to determine if we will will do the work
to be virtuous enough
to produce a world
that actually becomes worth living in
being an un person
is like a fire that is starved of oxygen
(neither your belief or disbelief in a god
ignites anything positive)
remember, when judging whether religion is helpful
you only see what that person’s religiosity does for you
not what it does to them
God told me to kill myself, drink piss, and date a woman out of my league
so far i’ve only done the middle one
but the first one is much more likely to happen
than the last
i think like Satan
just tear shit apart
without even the awareness of mercy
Poetry Old and New
like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
has DON’T PANIC printed on front
the Bible should have
DON’T BE A DICK
printed on the front
sanity is a spectrum
some times it’s better to be on one side
or the other
than aimlessly bouncing around the middle
what religion boils down to
is a way to get people to believe
the best is always yet to come
if you are perfectly atomized
following all of Jesus’ teachings
will make you miserable
while following all of Satan’s
will have you feeling great
just as a quantum particle is changed
by you measuring it
a person is changed
by you labeling them
i’m a piece of shit
but i’m not allowed to believe it
(((i’m not allowed to bounce my thoughts off their thoughts)))
remember i am a sopping wet sacrifice turning into a
putrid rotting carcass while you are told to wait and hope
(15 years and only got one janitor job i didn’t take because i thought i could do better)
(religion)
tying desperately needed moral teaching
to superstition
was nailing the life boat
to the main ship
I tried to cash out my faith
they looked at me funny and said there was a penalty for early withdrawal
and they wouldn’t let me see the balance
faith was like one of those quantum particles that disappears upon observation
I am an unperson
I am a constellation of thoughts, drives, and emotions
with no center
I don’t hold grudges, grudges hold me
I don’t think, my thoughts think themselves
(sadness due to individual as well as collective situations)
remember that love is like quantum entanglement
it means a part of your heart will break
from something that could be happening
thousands of miles away
it wasn’t worth it
people say the pain of the process will make sense in the end
but kneading and baking are only worth it if the bread doesn’t burn
As I write this some people are trying to concoct some kind of redemptive narrative on how the last four years of Trump made us better somehow. Some people paid the ultimate price for his ineptitude with COVID with their lives. Others’ mental health was reduced. I’m a mess. Two of my smartest friends are engaging Q Anon, one as a believer while the other as a vocal critic. In 2016 I had hope that this could be turned around but now, even with more Democrats in power I do not. I think we passed a tipping point where both the radical left and radical right have come to believe the game has already been lost. Fatalism is the most powerful way to be powerless. And people on both ends of the political spectrum are gaining numbers while the middle is being hollowed out.
I didn’t suffer so much directly from Trump despite a couple brushes with losing my healthcare. But I think sometimes what you lose in the suffering is worse than the hurt of the suffering itself. Society is more toxic than ever. Families are torn apart. Feminism is attacked, hurting women, and its backlash hurts men. Let me tell you, it has felt like eight years, not four. So maybe Trump slowed time down so much that he packed eight years worth of misery into four.
recent poetry
the only reason something is real
is because someone who can hurt you says it is
waiting is the worst pastime
because the time doesn’t pass!
you can be evil, you can burn goodness
and be warmed by the light of it going up in flames
but once it’s all gone
you have neither shelter nor warmth
a weakness of the self-esteem movement:
if you are on the bottom
then the negative thoughts about yourself are dead on accurate
(especially if you are a male
as being on the bottom keeps you from both friends and mating)
it’s easy to tell who the oppressor is
because they will be angry at you
for seeing yourself as the victim