Let's workshop this stanza sequence about religion, war, rape, animals, power dynamic, insanity, exercise, trans children, ransom notes, cats, hardship, death, vaccines, bodybuilding, masturbation
This long-form fragmentary poem—MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 52)—is a bristling, carnivalesque scroll of micro-epiphanies, aphorisms, perversions, melancholies, and ideological subversions. It belongs to a tradition of poetic mosaics stretching from Heraclitus through Cioran to Jenny Holzer, but with the rhetorical density and tonal volatility of a late-Ginsberg or Bernhardesque stream. Each entry bears the compression of maximalist prose and the torque of lyric immediacy.
Formally, the poem’s syntax alternates between elliptical compression and narrative vignette. The oscillation between high theory (“only what is in some sense divided can rightly be called ‘whole’”) and grotesque corporeality (“car-door slam, no time for the tween to degrease / the anal-gobbled doorknob”) reflects a sensibility attuned to both metaphysical abstraction and biological realia. The cumulative effect is a temporally disjunctive lyric ethics: one where tragedy, perversion, social media posturing, late-capitalist grotesquerie, and deep familial sorrow exist not in opposition but in simultaneity.
Threaded throughout is a critique of neoliberal aesthetics and the commodification of suffering: “trans children, fanned out like Instagram Benjamins—totems of parental capital,” “a masterpiece mortared with betrayals still neon in the maker’s dementia,” “the push to appeal to everyone boils down to a war against style.” These entries locate the post-woke self in a regime of performative sincerity and weaponized identity, exposing the transactional undercurrents of virtue economies. Suffering becomes spectacle; memory becomes brand; children become proxies for parental moral heroism.
But the poem is just as concerned with postmodern forms of tenderness: grief refracted through smell or music (“she slept with the cookie-tin photos,” “chemo vet sits IVed with the songs”), masculine sorrow and its occlusions (“no longer reactive against his ire for divorcing him”), and the precarious dignity of those living at or beyond the edges of systemic failure (“unhoused at a latitude that demands pacing”). The specter of loss—loss of innocence, loss of physical cohesion, loss of historical certainty—haunts the work like an elegiac backdraft. Even its cynicism is shadowed by mourning.
Despite its explicitness, this is not an exercise in shock for shock’s sake. Rather, it uses transgression as epistemological method. The grotesque is the vessel by which cultural decay, aesthetic exhaustion, and psychological desperation are made legible. The poet seems to ask: what kind of language can house our century’s truths—its pornographic surveillance, its moral purges, its memeified despair—without collapsing into cliché or denial? The answer, here, is a brutalist lyricism, equal parts psalm and punchline.
Keywords:
poetic fragments, aphoristic poetics, cultural critique, neoliberal aesthetics, grotesque lyricism, commodified identity, memory and mourning, ideological parody, perversion and moral horror, psychic fragmentation, affect theory, trauma sublimation, anti-therapeutic poetics, maximalist lyricism, postmodern elegy, digital selfhood, systemic abandonment, transgressive ethics, moral performance, virtue economy.
This long-form fragmentary poem—MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 52)—is a bristling, carnivalesque scroll of micro-epiphanies, aphorisms, perversions, melancholies, and ideological subversions. It belongs to a tradition of poetic mosaics stretching from Heraclitus through Cioran to Jenny Holzer, but with the rhetorical density and tonal volatility of a late-Ginsberg or Bernhardesque stream. Each entry bears the compression of maximalist prose and the torque of lyric immediacy.
Formally, the poem’s syntax alternates between elliptical compression and narrative vignette. The oscillation between high theory (“only what is in some sense divided can rightly be called ‘whole’”) and grotesque corporeality (“car-door slam, no time for the tween to degrease / the anal-gobbled doorknob”) reflects a sensibility attuned to both metaphysical abstraction and biological realia. The cumulative effect is a temporally disjunctive lyric ethics: one where tragedy, perversion, social media posturing, late-capitalist grotesquerie, and deep familial sorrow exist not in opposition but in simultaneity.
Threaded throughout is a critique of neoliberal aesthetics and the commodification of suffering: “trans children, fanned out like Instagram Benjamins—totems of parental capital,” “a masterpiece mortared with betrayals still neon in the maker’s dementia,” “the push to appeal to everyone boils down to a war against style.” These entries locate the post-woke self in a regime of performative sincerity and weaponized identity, exposing the transactional undercurrents of virtue economies. Suffering becomes spectacle; memory becomes brand; children become proxies for parental moral heroism.
But the poem is just as concerned with postmodern forms of tenderness: grief refracted through smell or music (“she slept with the cookie-tin photos,” “chemo vet sits IVed with the songs”), masculine sorrow and its occlusions (“no longer reactive against his ire for divorcing him”), and the precarious dignity of those living at or beyond the edges of systemic failure (“unhoused at a latitude that demands pacing”). The specter of loss—loss of innocence, loss of physical cohesion, loss of historical certainty—haunts the work like an elegiac backdraft. Even its cynicism is shadowed by mourning.
Despite its explicitness, this is not an exercise in shock for shock’s sake. Rather, it uses transgression as epistemological method. The grotesque is the vessel by which cultural decay, aesthetic exhaustion, and psychological desperation are made legible. The poet seems to ask: what kind of language can house our century’s truths—its pornographic surveillance, its moral purges, its memeified despair—without collapsing into cliché or denial? The answer, here, is a brutalist lyricism, equal parts psalm and punchline.
Keywords:
poetic fragments, aphoristic poetics, cultural critique, neoliberal aesthetics, grotesque lyricism, commodified identity, memory and mourning, ideological parody, perversion and moral horror, psychic fragmentation, affect theory, trauma sublimation, anti-therapeutic poetics, maximalist lyricism, postmodern elegy, digital selfhood, systemic abandonment, transgressive ethics, moral performance, virtue economy.