if we've weaponized everything else, why not weaponize poetry? here's my attempt...
Oh right the poem. But first, another preamble of course to put it in context.
It's my "Jabberwocky", in a sense, in that it partially works through sounds. I'm quite good at creating a beautiful sounding poem, probably partially because of my skills at piano. It's a poem by Lewis Carroll. It was a poem made up of nonsensical words.
So what's the point of doing just that? Good question. Here's my short answer.
Jabberwocky | The Poetry Foundation
How I interpret Jabberwocky is there's meaning in madness (to certain degrees, in various aspects) and the reverse: madness in meaning (again you have to qualify the statement, otherwise it's a blanket statement). that's what's brilliant about poetry, it's partially seemingly nonsensical, partially too complex to be understood, and never laden with blanket statements (if well written).
My other interpretation of Jabberwocky is that there are meanings in sounds (that one is obvious, I admit). The beauty of poetry is it works through two prisms: the prism of the author's mind, and then the prism of each reader. Therefore I would argue the knowledge you can get from one well written poem read by one person, is in a sense, vast. Maybe not infinite, although it theoretically could be, but vast nonetheless beyond comprehension, a bit like thinking of a great number in the hundreds of thousands.
But first, another preamble (apologies....)
Probably the best poem I will ever write.
I started writing poetry just as stream of consciousness, and have hundreds of those, some better than others, and admittedly not polished, but valuable as an experiment and also as expression of the unconscious (might be useful to look at with a psychoanalyst, for example.)
I have dozens more of more polished works, some of which I have deleted, I used to have an account on Hellopoetry and another site with some thirty odd poems I have written, and can select some for you, if interested. There are hundreds of thousands of authors (possibly millions) who post their works online for free, and many brilliant poets in this modern age of easily accessible internet access.
I wrote about reflections (literally and figuratively) in a "poem about everything" (and, somewhat paradoxically, nothing) that I called the infinity mirror. I thought of doing it admittedly not through imagination but because there's an infinity mirror in my mother's house in Cambridge.
I wrote it in 30 minutes. Didn't realize its scope and significance (that I am still realizing) until years later. I read it once at a poetry event at a local bar in Central Sq.
Still revealing layers of its meaning and complexity.
As I have grown to say, there's the infinite in the miniscule, and to some extent, the apparent opposite (like a mirror itself), the miniscule in the infinite.
And poetry is a good example of infinite in the (apparent) miniscule.
it's also a warning about technology acceleration and AI. I didn't know of AIs existence at the time I wrote this, back in 2016, but I think it applies from what I understand about these burgeoning technologies, currently.
And that's another key point about poetry, it can be about something according to the original intent of the author, and someone can apply it to almost anything else. Beautiful and breathtaking realization, at least to me that is.
it's about psychosis (which I have from drug abuse), mirrors, narcissism, infinity, the internet, knowledge itself, fear, self-defeating thought processes, turning against oneself being isolated, growing up in a mansion in protected environment, vanity, greed, entitlement, false pretense, societal narcissism, being observer, rather than participant. And also about a meaningless existence.
a poem about nothing, and a poem about everything. a duality of contradictions.
Here you have it:
THE INFINITY MIRROR
Read it as a poem where the mirror is personified, in a sense, as the artist.
So part of the fun and idea is to decide for yourself what your relationship is not only to the poet but to that enigmatic mirror (the artist)
Also a poem about schizophrenia where the voices are imagined as images or ideas. Also in a sense language is reflected back.
As far as I see it there are three basic forms of narcissism the poem touches on. The personal narcissism of the author, the narcissism that occurs from looking into the mirror (or interacting with reality in varying, complicated, and oblique ways), and the societal narcissism, embodied by the infinity mirror itself. And so you can see through that prism of seeing basic theoretical ideas of this particular poem how intricate language and poetry can be in general, and thus how intricate perceptions, distortions and prisms of reality can be.
Stream of consciousness poem, written in about half an hour almost 8 years ago now.
And finally, here you have it.
The naked poem. (reminds me the movie Naked Gun, which I watched in a simpler place in time (1000 years ago, perhaps), in terms of technological "progress.")
The Infinity Mirror
Reminiscent of a dream:
(The mirror, the ghostly figure,
The long, loving grass.)
The infinity mirror, for all its potential
To Smooth over the untamed roughness
Of Humanity's vague contours
Exposes blood with shaving blades,
And generosity in masquerades.
And still the pallor of blush,
And the discoloration of adoration,
Are but servile to anticipation
The reflector of infinity
The eery promise
Reaching towards divinity
Or a torturous, blind hell-bent path
The blind mirror promises
Infinity, duality
The shattered, puerile ghost caught between
The Ubiquitous, sterile host of magisterial illusion
The fragmented stone beneath him
Like an altar on a monestary
Grounding him to the magestic illusion
Of groundless deceit, Of Boston's conceit
Reverse that curse! Oh arrow-bent skies
Of intrepid, oblique, malleable time
That bends about paths through human hearts
To human marrows, to decay, to remorse
The skin, like a cage like a gibbet upholding the body
Knows not the force of infinity's grasp
Until it overtakes him in a moment of intrepid deceit.
In these hallowed halls ghostly particles dance,
Ghostly bodies collide and recombine into once visible
Charades of macabre cavemen.
Once, always visible in the mirror, unknowable is the heart.
In this illusory rebirth, is the ghost in the machine
A rare emblem of an oscillating enigma.
Identity is unknown to the mirror (clearly)
Vanity is unknown to the self
How transparent the mirror makes
Blood-meat of a man!
Gushing listlessly, he retraces the mirror's arrows
Onto the lines on the page.
He retraces the chalk on the lines.
He becomes just the vane words on the page.
Words, and the mirror of language
The potency lost to fragmented duplication.
The mosaic is born,
Unseen, to vague, blurred visions of a fragmented incarceration.
But language outcasts him,
Him tangled deeply within its moat,
Its dubbed deeply embedded within him,
Ah, again the duality!
His mirror-image, the words
Against the page, untold sillhouttes
Of a dark, flickering, menacing display
Of brash omens.
The words, his craft of silence's
Burrow, of despair's laundry,
Of an empty room without
Any charge at all.
The words, against the words.
But that he sees not.
The words against the self.
He sees not.
Blinded by narcissism, by that mirror.
