Recently I was provided the opportunity to smoke DMT, one of the most confounding & intense experiences of my life. It is difficult to reconcile the out of body, death-like experience with the simplicity of this ubiquitous compound, found in mammal brains & numerous plants, including acacia. I felt death. On coming out of the…
Read Morebetween noisescapesilence
Haven’t written a poem for a while, but this has emerged in the last few weeks. Very much a sensory response manifesting out of my studies into my actual encounters & affiliation with a world of objects, object-sound, object-smell, object-taste. between noisescapesilence the extractor fan in the bathroom is too loud its loudness…
Read MoreBodies
Another poem written after I returned from Korea. This poem is an attempt to realize poetically, Tim Morton’s replacement term for ‘nature’, the symbiotic real. Morton’s reasons for abandoning the word nature & the (capital N) baggage with it, is owing to the erroneous perception that nature is somewhere, or some state, we need to…
Read MoreMeaninglessness
I think this is one of only a handful of poems I have written since moving to Exeter, to study. Somewhat influenced by Camus, his persuasive Absurdism, which to me has always been a methodology to encourage an acceptance of life as ultimately meaningless; this isn’t something to despair over. It is only meaningless in…
Read MoreHuman Flourishing
The title is misleading, sarcastic. This poem is a response to a talk by some guy called Alex Epstein, who started something called The Human Flourishing Project. Alex believes nonrenewable energy sources are the reason for human flourishing. The rise in population (which he seems to think good because that means humanity is flourishing), health,…
Read MoreMotif Lately
This is a motifational poem. The motif motifates the writer, spurring associations to render the poem into a unity, if only a superficial, galvanizing unity. But where would anything be without either motifation or superficilaity? Nature made man & man makes superficial motifations. It’s endless. The motif for me is occasioned by a form of…
Read MoreMorning on & on
Been rummaging—again—through the poems I wrote on my return to England. Found this one, with a refrain, a repetition, & repetition is very much puncturing the days without mercy. I don’t recall the exact details of my disposition at the time of writing this. Poems tend to fall into a constellation of activity, a particularly…
Read MoreCrown of Air
This poem should be read as the poetic companion piece to my essay Covid-19: Agent of Change, which I posted last week. I haven’t wrote a new poem for ages. I expect on finishing my MA I will write poetry enthusiastically, I still think in it at least, I just don’t stop, as I inveterately…
Read MoreBelated Call for Submission
While studying toward my MA, I am doing assistant editor work for the University of Exeter postgraduate journal Exclamat!on. If you are a postgraduate & want to submit, the guidelines are below. You’ll need to be fast, so hopefully you have something hiding away in a folder somewhere. If you miss this round, keep us…
Read MoreMachine Learning
I A machine enters the forest. The trees, the endorphined air as well as the birds’ circumspection play dead. Until they start intuiting the machine’s curiosity, its authentic verisimilitude, its making note, they will not dare resume as usual. Resigned to it being, in their midst. They reorient, relate-to the…
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