pith…

As empty
and emptying
as it may be
without longing
how would you know
how much further you have
to go.

The compulsion of the virtual is the compulsion to exist *in potentia* on all screens, to be embedded in all programs… – Jean Baudrillard

The shadow owes its existence to light.
For this, it is grateful, though, on occasion, darkened by resentment.

She was downsized.
Severance was a bonus.

Can anyone recommend people who use twitter for complete micro stories or poems? Or ppl who are writing longer works in twitter tidbits?

The interest for principles is nearing zero.

No artist tolerates reality. – Nietzsche

“Unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up. . . he nevertheless overcomes the obstructions. . . and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image.”
- Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage

/
My baby rolled over and squirmed back into the mirror from where he came. I would get at him with my every quivered tissue. I can hardly trust that he sucks the slow ooze from his mercury teether or explores the ear holes of his innumerable others. If there is but one lone baby, he is not me. But if there are cramped cities of babies enraptured by a skirted magus in his floppy winged hat, then I am far too many. In the meeting of mirrors on either side of the nerves I house, in both bends of planar sheen, a familiar procession, not a baby among the disseminate hoards, approaches. I turn away, pick at my cuticles, and leave them to themselves.

|
A wave of dismissal, like I’m some blood-hungry gnat. My projection flatly indicates he is less than pleased with the 34 X 30 image I have selected for us from the rack. He yawns, unsnaps, reminds me that the personal pronoun is a foolish ideal, and removes himself to the recesses of his silence. I’m beginning to think that my baby is a fraud.

\
I have seen him at seventy. He keeps his clothes and mothballs zipped tightly, hangs them from a furnace pipe in their naugahyde coffin of tasteful maroon, is not impressed by babies. He speaks over their crying of his sixty-three bombings, his voice folding Dresden in half at its syllables, trailing off into the thin bang of his red pocket stapler attaching the sheets from the outside in. He was shown the films later. He loathes the word homeless, is prim in his brown fragrant suit, picks litter from sidewalks, naps daily in the temperate wood, feeds deer granola from his shaken palms, disappears for the winter, maybe longer.

– joesmith

Yet happy. Life.

Fear, yet. Still.

There is no balm.

Networks are surveillance.

The double-bind has quadrupled now.

Mourning the absence of authenticity.
Wondering if anyone will recognize it
if its emanations ever come back in style.

“What do you expect, one is what one is, partly at least.”
- Samuel Beckett, _Molloy_

Once released to the virtual ether,
our free-floating, simulated hyper-signs
pass through minds like excited neutrinos.

“The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.” – E.M. Cioran

Editing too many images, off in the dark.
Writing on snakes, tied in Moebian knots.
Echoes in the hollows of an almost soul.

Weird to be awash,
wet through our bones,
in rivers of talk, when there’s
nothing new to say about anything.

When I’m done, love; when the impalpable
me has made its sullen exit, please lay me
out in the open. I’ll return to useful sooner.