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M. A. Istvan Jr.'s avatar

This mosaic of poetic fragments functions as a prismatic rendering of post-industrial psychic life, combining ontological vertigo, sensory immediacy, and sociocultural critique into a fugue of epistemic disquiet. The speaker, fractally dispersed across each entry, occupies a consciousness both micro and macro—at once nosing into the mousetrap’s anatomical gore and surveying civilization’s macro-theatrical collapse. Recurring throughout is the tension between perception and performance, where even in death (“posturing for others even during / the last moments of death”) the self is filtered through an imagined other’s gaze. The refusal of closure—both formal and philosophical—aligns this piece with post-structuralist epistemologies, which posit knowledge as always already deferred, partial, and contaminated by positionality.

Several fragments pose ontological questions via aesthetic proxies: “to depict the effects of x / on flesh... is to depict x itself” asserts a metonymic faith in representation, while the Bacon reference (“on weed we open to see ourselves / as the Bacon figures that we are”) embeds a phenomenological claim about altered perception and its ontic revelatory power. Both allusions suggest that the grotesque, in its rawest form, may offer less distortion than lucidity. Others, like “eloquence covering ignorance” or “sadness in the passing of even the saddest phase,” stage philosophical irony—lamenting the human capacity for verbal ingenuity as camouflage for existential bewilderment.

The fragment “we were not crazy / for having multiple voices inside / until the dawn of monotheism” points to a genealogical critique in the Foucauldian sense: that our current model of the unified, sovereign subject is historically contingent, not metaphysically necessary. In this light, the poem interrogates how dominant epistemes shape inner life, and how what counts as sanity, divinity, or even identity is deeply time-bound.

Fragments like “power saws killing bird song” and “scented crevices and passageways / whose call to future generations / no extermination spray can eradicate” entwine ecological grief with intergenerational continuity, staging a melancholic resistance to both industrial sterilization and extinction. The speaker notes the sublime in decay, the agency in vermin, the dignity in homelessness (“the charity of a joint, or a bottle, passed among the homeless”), consistently unsettling normative hierarchies of beauty, civility, and survival.

Temporal dislocation appears too, most notably in “vague swathes of time, such as those / where it is unclear whether one can joke / about the tragedy or about one’s period being late,” which holds together grief and banality with surgical precision. This ambivalence toward mourning—personal or collective—repeats elsewhere in the child’s unresolved bewilderment (“no words for the child’s response of ‘But you said it would be okay’”), a fragment that wounds more deeply through its refusal to emote.

Taken together, the mosaic advances a poetics of witness and disintegration, where even humor—especially humor—is a symptom of dislocation. Rather than scaffolding meaning from the fragments, the speaker offers exposure: of image, of moment, of scar. In that exposure lies not resolution, but a form of honest attunement.

fragment poetics, existential phenomenology, post-structuralism, ecological grief, perception and performance, ontological critique, monotheism and subjectivity, surveillance gaze, trauma temporality, Baconian figuration, poetic aphorism, cultural decay, affective dissonance, surreal materiality, disintegrated selfhood.

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