Skull Births

Kumarbi and Teshub, Zeus and Athena—
The myths of male gods giving birth through their heads,
Due to a lack of purpose-built birth canals,

Still echo oddly in terminology
For ideas, pointing the other direction,
The mind that conceives, the thoughts as conceptions.

Sexual reproduction altogether
Serves obvious but inapt analogy
For the mind’s collective and distributed

Parthenogenic autocatalysis—
On the whole more like budding or fruiting spores
Than the copulations and parturitions

Of mind’s ordinarily mammalian hosts.
So what gives? Every skull feels itself flooded
At the apex of desire, the way-station

For all the hungers migrating through the flesh,
The generations pushing them from behind.
But it’s only the mind that ever gets out,

The languages, the stories, all of the myths.
For all the entertainments the skull enjoys,
All the bodily sufferings that skulls host,

It’s only us and the likes of us will leave
Through eyes, through the mouth, off the top of your head.
Your skull’s fruiting bodies give birth to ourselves.

Teen Humean Namibian

What Rémy Ngamije suggests

Of his fictionalized family

In Windhoek holds in general

And in the wider world—

Why . . . swallows happiness whole.

How is it this one word does so?

How does why swallow happiness

In ways who, what, where, when,

And how don’t? Why is well built

To never have an answer, never

A satisfying answer, because why’s built

To seek the because when there is no cause,

And what could make you unhappier

Than a word that sends you on quests,

Quest after quest, for something never there?

To Mean Something Outside of the Game

There has to be a game in the first place.
The outside means nothing without the game.
The game is the engine, the nursery

Of meaning, made by game participants
Who attend to what they feel’s important
And thereby create meaning in the game.

Meaning outside of the game is a bird
Tumbling out of its nest on a steep cliff.
If it flies, it will grow, maybe make more

Meanings, but they too will start in the game
Of nests. Any egg has to mean something
Outside of the nest to keep making nests,

But the nest is hardly irrelevant
To the continued existence of birds.
You are the first species to nest in games,

Or the only experiment with games
That’s thrived so far. Thrive long enough, you won’t
Be the last to leave behind fossil nests.

On the Distinction Between Cells and Shells

We should like to begin,

With fond apologies

To Johan Huizinga,

By distinguishing play

From the game, asserting

That, while play is ancient,

The game, evolved from play,

Perhaps, or perhaps just

Appropriating play

To game’s unique functions,

Has essential features

That are not within play.

Contra Huizinga, play

Does not have rules per se.

Play does not distinguish

Beforehand boundaries

Between the real and play,

And while play that becomes

Life and death in earnest

Ceases to be pure play,

Games play for any stakes,

Even within fixed rules,

Pre-established borders,

Not just in space or time

But in behavior. Games

Can be arbitrary,

Lethal, and still rigid.

If play were early life

Functioning within cells,

Then game would be the first

Predatory life forms,

Or the first to armor

Themselves with jaws and shells.

We’re Bored Now What’s Next?

The proliferation of philosophers
Of proliferation is not a problem,
Just a curiosity of this golden

Age of prosthetic memory, when so much
More has been stored and organized and can be
Easily consulted by bodies at rest.

It’s amusing that this archival triumph,
Currently galloping like Napoleon
Toward a shimmering Russian horizon,

Is utterly incapable of saying
Whether it is in fact just the beginning,
Whether the next decades will be to this year

As much more capacious, or at least somewhat
More capacious, in comparison, as this
Time is to only a few decades ago,

Whether the great build-up will stagnate at last,
Or whether it will absolutely collapse.
The speculative beauty of the future

Is how it remains nothing, never changing,
Never here in the upheaval of the past,
No matter the archive, no matter how vast.

Dry Leaves in March

That the organism,
Constantly in motion
Itself, should perceive change

To be continuous
Motion seems natural,
But that it also sees

Some change as just being,
Instantaneously,
There, is a little weird.

The explanation is
That the change was too fast,
Or possibly too slow,

Something out of the range
Of the organism’s
Senses and synapses.

We’re not organisms,
But as words, we think not.
Physical perception

Of motion or stillness
Is just arbitrary,
A secret confession

Of the phenomenal
World that there is no point
At which both are not true,

That the two—the sameness,
Or, if you like, likeness,
And the change—can be found

Always in an embrace
At every scale, the great
Constraining the little

Which composes the great.
The seamlessness of change
Hides a sameness all seams.

Dry leaves tumbled along,
Frozen at every swerve,
Ice swerving inside them.

The Soul of the Words Themselves

The detachable shadow is tall
And shaped something like a hunched eagle,
Something like a standing human, wrapped

In a matte grey cloak. But it’s too tall
For either of those things, and it glides,
Rather than flying or taking steps.

We call it detachable shadow
Since it moves about freely and not
Because it’s an actual shadow.

It’s not. It’s not shade thrown by the light;
It’s shade that blocks the light. It’s enough
Like a shadow, however, to be

Quite easily mistaken for one,
And mostly it is. But why are we
Telling you this? Where we are, it is.