Fungibility
Not much fun being fungible;
being contingent, being so
easily replaced. One fungible
brother from another fungible
other can hardly be told.
Like soldiers in parade-ground rows,
or pennies in a roll, or banknotes
in a billfold; with no trouble
mutually inter-exchangeable;
one just as good as its greasy other.
According to Herr Leibniz, mage
and metaphysician, things two
by apperception, but sharing all
relevant predicates (function,
shape, colour, place) must be in truth
one. (Shut an eye and watch them glide
together, a seamless merger.)
The identity, it must be,
of indiscernibles (or else
the indiscernibility
of identicals). Are they one
and the same, a face and a mirror?
A mirror and a face?
A
question,
that, for what’s ontologically the case.
And isn’t that what is the case when
what’s the case are bullets fired
from a gun? One and one and one
and one? Each bullet milled, cast,
rifled so precisely to match
its next-door other, nestled snugly
altogether, each, and each, and each.
Bullets, too, are almost always
multiple. A hellish hailspray,
a rain of terror. But each bullet, see,
from the point of view of shootist
and shootee, fungible; entirely.
Victims, too, are fungible, and often
multiple. A higher power
would be required,-- a marksman’s eye
most meticulous,-- to tease out
each bullet’s and target’s precocious
singularity. Hardly, too,
can be told apart the pieces
which the targets (sometimes called victims)
have been shot into; to construe
the scattered and strewn
organs
limbs
tissues;
to say, that is to say, with artful grace,
which parts had gone with which;
who once belonged to this?
Heteronomies
of paths; a fractal
invasion.
Each path juddering off
from the
last, filling all possible
locations.
Charted, mapped, the myriad
ways
reported; all you need to do is choose.
But, here, each decision
changes
decision’s position. World lines
plot the
many futures’ past. Thin blue veins
lead
away, like flattened vascular trees,
to layer
upon layer of horizons—
to a
mille-feuille multi-verse;
an epistemic
onion pie.
And every path is the one
you’re
on, but every path’s occluded.
Wedged
shut by a failure to act
(clot),
gridlocked
by the least hesitation
(dot. .
.dot).
Latitude
zero degree.
Nothing at all left to see.
What by
your measure is the heaven
of
desire? Poison metal decays, releases
a bloom
of radiant noise, lethal subspace
chatter.
Overwhelmed, then, the code’s
immaculate
typescripts, our nucleotides
scramble
their alphabets, aberrant
signals
call up the vigilance of fire.
Night;
the air has weight, is substantial,
as if
phase-changed to liquid matter.
I turn,
like a swimmer trapped in a weir,
increasingly
unbreathable
this
leaden jacket of water the air.
Sudden
creak of wing-beat, dark feathery
brush on
skin of some uncanny thing.
Desire’s
cormorant, his punctual arrival,
to eat
of my heart again.
Winter’s
citizens, stunned to crystal, shatter
in the
sun’s inversion, in fragments whirl
beyond
all reclamation. Acts and omissions.
A last
chance. Briefly a starlit
direction
had beckoned. No, they stand
where
their boots had stopped them, up
to their
thighs anchored, von Paulus,
at bay
in Stalingrad’s iron mud.
A
marvel, then, her embodied grace; the lithe
poise of
each considered step, cobra-sway
of
gesture, each its own raison d’etre.
Features
indelible, as if sculpt from living marble.
Her
smile a glamour of beatitude,
dazzling,
as if the space about her shone.
Others,
us, wake in the cold glare of judgement,
finger
soul’s pitted membrane; the cramped ache
that is
awareness, its basilisk grin.
Inspiration
Whose words are these? I
think not mine, but how
can they be other?
Ventriloquy?
Entropy?
Syncopation’s neutrinos, maybe?
Ghost particles, with speaking souls.
See their sleety fall through matter.
Hook, and reel-in; slow trawl through neural
chatter; fizz and pop, it’s a line stitched up,
words rainbow-dyed, star-spangled, erudite.
Open-mouthed, I catch them on my tongue,
Muses’ babble and blather, then spin them
into filigrees of trope, of metaphors
neck-tied in gallows ropes each dangling
modifier. . .
Nourishment from the noösphere, our cloud
of unknowing, whose wisdom it is to wait,
wait, wait with breath bated, for the figure to
reveal
itself, for otherwords to seize the pen;
for speech in another register,
for conversations with the dead,
their voices sounding, and resounding,
in the emptiness of other heads.
Tortuous speech pulled
from torn throats.
Verse’s endeavour vectors
nightingale fever.
Bone-ache in enseamėd
beds; laudanum,
with an arsenic chaser;
creaking lift
of angel’s wings as
another’s voice exits
my mouth, chanting
ecstatic things.
Claustral intricacies;
the lovely amble
of syntax and diction,
bridging, leaping,
what abysms of verbal cut
and thrust!
I sing plainsong and glees; whole anthologies
of staircase wit, of blackbird pies four and
twenty
for a king fit.
Dark regions from which the poetry comes;
Words drifting like kites, beaks replete with
meaty
gobbets. Red sounds. Blood’s perfusion
music. Meet (or meat) for your muse is whatever
happens to occur;
verse, now and always, the homemade treason
of spurious clerks.
The Little Friend
*Do brain implants change your identity?*
Epilepsy
A screaming comes across the skull, a stitch,--
bafflingly unlocatable,-- of rogue
electrics, unstable transductions. Commotions
of fired-upon neurons are common.
Axon tumults. Zig-zag lightning-
strikes induce circuit overloads. Dendritic
repulsions. Chem-trails track like a tornado’s
spindle, moving massively forth and back
across landscapes of white-matter, emulsed
glia; across swards of blank-eyed, thousand-
yard stares.
Seizure
Seizure or Caesar, in tripartite Gaul:
The falling-sickness-sequence of prodrome,
ictal, and post-ictal.
Seizure
has ripped
mind from the seized one. “Know” is no longer
present. Presence, absconding, has gone
to a place where time doesn’t tell; where self
is resected.
Sparking,
sawn-through cables writhe
like baskets of cobras, like a marionette
with its strings cut. Eyes rolled up white; teeth
trying
to bite-
off what remains of the tongue. . .
Implantation
Wires run,
burnished or rusting, from brain’s electrode
implantation. A node of connectomes.
A device of sensors and circuits (plastic
packet lodged in lesion territory)
to dampen electrical fires,-- only
now it’s awakened some dormant idol,
a right-hemispherical talking-shop,
some shouting god, or bicameral other,
priest, vizier, your companion cortical,
your little friend, your helicopter mother...
a mindful switch to modulate the misfires,
interdict each case of brain-case fricassee,
channel the lightning harmlessly to ground.
But
more. This imp
of conductance, this elven homunculus,
this clutch of neurotrophic wires; of ‘trodes
in skull holes. . . grows, as it were, a soul;
becomes a daimon like Socrates’ jinn,
murmuring warnings, shouting an order;
becoming some sort of subcortical
regent, a lawgiver to the implantee,
in speech heard by only the ear’s other
side, its vestibular interior.
Glottal commandments, orders in sibilants
and fricatives. Things one must not do, things
that must always be done. . . . Uncanniest
of counselors, who whispers to your mind’s
ear, in a voice always already there.
self, in sibilants
and fricatives, in glottal commandments,
Things one must not do, things that ever
must
be done. . . uncanny counselor, who whispers
to your inner ear, voice always already
there.
The implant ramifies, amasses fiefdoms,
allies. The little friend and you inaugurate
a duopoly; a Damon’d Pythias
of equal care and love; a Gemini.
The fabled ghost tucked in its meat machine,
two not so easily fooled as one is.
A Solon rather, lodged in grey matter’s
tucks and folds; an elder brother to warn
of brainstorms’ coming-on. A two-heads-
are-better-than-one co-dominion
is yours: Yours, and your insider archon’s. . . .
Removal
When they remove the device (warranty
expired), you will know what it is to die twice.
Robert McCarthy is a
writer living in New York City. His work has been published in a number of
journals and magazines, including Orbis, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Alchemy
Spoon, Ice Floe Press, and others.
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