Essay: It's the Dicks Who Are Infected and Deranged

 

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This needs plenty of editing, but I wanted to get it up today for my own purposes.  I recommend waiting to read it for a couple days... thanks for stopping by!

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It's the Dicks Who Are Infected and Deranged

 

In this essay, I develop and compare two diametric views.  One says that staying silent in the face of an empire’s evil infects and deranges you, while the other claims the opposite, namely, that if you speak up, you will be infected.  Plenty of polemics to follow!

 

Launchpad quote

 

To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement--Philip K. Dick

 

The above quote could mean various things.  A common interpretation is that lust for power is seductive and leads to debauchery.  In any case, the quote could be said to have a deeper meaning, one that calls for complacency.  Why fight the Empire, if you will become “infected?”  Infection implies an unpleasant state or worse, such as being crippled or disfigured.  Who wants that?  When you add the hard-hitting “derangement”--a disturbed, broken state of mind--the message becomes unequivocal. 

 

The Dick View

 

By taking the quote out of whatever original context was provided by the writer, I express how most of us confront and interact with it.  Among the scattery, chattery blizzards of social media, Dick’s meme-worthy statement has been left to wander; and from that drifting perch of isolated prominence, it boldly proclaims:  Avoid a fight with the empire on price of your soul!

I will call this the Dick View.  The people who follow it, then, are eponymous Dicks.

 

Einstein isn’t a Dick, chooses to fight instead

 

Let’s compare the Dick view to something said by Albert Einstein.  When the great thinker left Europe to escape fascism, he found himself appalled by a similar abomination in the United States; namely, the undeniable, entrenched, intergenerational scourge of vast, violent social and economic denigration, subjugation and containment of Black people.  That’s an unwieldly sentence, for sure, and yet it hardly touches on the magnitude of racism in the USA, a scourge whose history includes centuries of slavery going back to 1619 [1]. 

In Einstein’s time, for instance, segregation was legal and ‘Jim Crow’ laws effectively negated Black people’s fundamental rights.  Lynchings occurred with impunity.  Bullying was the norm, such as common, public use of the N-word.  The fact that White people shouldn’t even say the word today indicates the ongoing, unspoken sickness which festers in my country.

Liberated from Nazism in 1933, but then increasingly fraught, Einstein wrote: “The more I feel an America, the more this situation pains me.  I can escape the feelings of complicity in it only by speaking out.”   

Einstein, then, isn’t a Dick.  He joined the NAACP and in other various ways engaged in candid, vocal criticism.  During a commencement speech at Lincoln University, he orated:

The separation of the races is not a disease of the colored people, but a disease of the white people.  I do not intend to be quiet about it [2].

 

The Einstein View

 

We can extract from the above an obverse to the Dicks.  I’ll call it the Einstein view:  If you don’t fight imperial evil, your silence infects and deranges you.

By “silence” I reference someone in Einstein’s position who, instead of speaking out to alleviate the “pain” from their “feelings of complicity,” chooses to say and do nothing.  To just go along.  The silent person, in this scenario, is fully aware that what they are seeing is egregious and atrocious.  They recognize the malignity of it, but choose not to protest in any way.

Such silence is itself a form of complicity.  Moreover, as I argue below, it is the first step in a gravitational pull of darkness, one which works to suck the slipping person, the ‘go-along,’ deeper into the support of imperial evil.  An example of such evil is “the separation of the races,” what Einstein calls “a disease of the white people.”

I argue, as well, that the Einstein view aligns with a theory of societal dynamics that I develop in this essay.  In the summary section, I conclude that it is ethical and healthy to speak out.  I also discuss what it means to protest effectively, even if, due to highly adverse circumstances, it must be more subtle than vocal.

The institutionalized racism in the USA is the central case study.  It is not, however, the only grave iniquity at the judgement table.  The arguments below apply more generally, mutatis mutandis, to various scenarios of silence and protest in regard to Big Lies and police-state enforcement.

 

The Theory of Complicitous Gravitation (TCG)

 

Silence, as well as being a state of complicity, exerts a steady, magnetic effect, which tends to suck a person into a deceitful state that fractures the psyche.  I call this phenomenon complicitous gravitation. 

People who choose silence are prone to slip deeper into an empire’s grip, impelled by dual inducements.  In the final stage, worship and obedience are maximal, and the mind becomes infected and deranged.  Hail, Caesar!

 

Dual inducements of TCG

 

Temptation and pain-avoidance combine to pull people deeper into partnership with evil.  In short, the carrot and the stick.

1.  The carrot is two-pronged:  (a) a sense of relief that the system won’t punish you for speaking out and (b) an admission ticket, namely, entry into the bazaar of in-group opportunism.

The opportunity gained could be something relatively small, such as a neighborhood summer job. Or it could be much more:  a chance at government work, business deals or power at the community, state or national level.  For a woman, in-group status in the empire could mean staying at home and being a housewife, joining the PTA, auxiliary social clubs, and so on.

(Sexism is an invariable trait of imperialism.  The original Big Lie, which every ‘good citizen’ most accept as a loyalty test, is that the freedom and potential of over half the human species must be hobbled for servitude toward the other half).

By selling out and staying quiet, you get a chance to find a place in the empire’s hierarchal ladder of power and wealth.  There is also a sense of relief, because you have chosen to conform and obey, and so the police state and the social attack dogs won’t bear down on you (so you think ...).

2.  The stick, ironically, comes from your own mind.  Staying silent creates a certain kind of psychological pain, which I call core tension.  It is originates from the conscience, but also other intrapsychic inputs or voices.

The pain, this core tension, can increase to become unbearable.   We humans tend to do what we can to get away from pain, including the psych sort, such as guilt.  But if you stay silent--if you don’t make the choice that Einstein made, which is the honest route--you have to deal with the misery coming from inside you another way:  by suppressing it. 

As the pain increases, due to your ongoing silence, suppression gets harder and harder.  In the end, to shut down your own inner urgings--your heart, your conscience, your empathy, your reason--drastic measures take the fore (take the forebrain , one might say)  

When this happens, suppression turns into repression:  the construction of impassable psychic walls between input centers of the mind.  Your cognitive filters fortify twisted modes of perception.

This dark transformation, in which evil is then embraced as good, is akin to selling your soul to Mephistopheles--or his proxy, the empire.

 

Core Tension

When you stay silent in the face of evil, you begin to experience a certain kind of pain.  It is a conglomerate of negative valanced emotions and senses--guilt, confusion, stress, uneasiness, revulsion and so on.  Every person is different and not all of these thorny weights need be present. 

Core tension is similar to what psychologists call cognitive dissonance, but it specifically involves major issues in morality, that is, the ethical standards and principles taught to us as children.  An example is the Golden Rule, treat others as you would be treated yourself.  The Golden Rule is a common sense expression of decency, dignity, equality, fairness and balance.

Even if a person’s conscience is weak or nonexistent, they can still feel core tension.  To live as if something is true when it is blatantly false--to embrace illogic as logic--is jarring and disorienting.  It unleashes an awful, compelling counter-reaction.  Your own mind tries to pull you back from the abyss.

Living in such fundamental contradiction can lead to chaos and anxiety.  After all, if you let go of reason as a standard for one critical component of reality, where and when is it not expendable?

 

A Malevolent Metamorphosis

Imagine someone in Einstein’s situation, who enters America and witnesses the country's inveterate racism for the first time.  If such a person chooses silence, they are now within the outer perimeter of a perilous psychological pull, one that attempts to draw them through four stages of complicity and disintegration:

1. Initial silence.  Compartmentalize and suppress core tension to deal with it later.

2. Enduring silence.  Turn ‘deal with it later’ into ‘deal with it much later.’  Long-term compartmentalization to continuously suppress core tension.

3. Semipermeable silence.  Initiate the process of  turning suppression into repression.  Bury your core tension down in a place where you can never feel it.  Mud turning to rock.

4. Orwellian silence.  Complete the tragedy of the fractured the mind.  Look at reality 'through a glass darkly.'  Evil is good and good is evil.  Silence takes the form of vocal support for the empire.  At this stage, silence can be very loud.

 

Suppression, compartmentalization and repression.  They can be part of a healthy emotional management--or not.  It depends on how these mental tools are used and what structures (cognitive filters or schemata) they help to sculpt.  Nonetheless, a terrible self-inflicted horror manifests when someone demands that their own mind, through sheer stubborn force of will, twists itself into an ontological pretzel.

 

What is ‘Speaking up’?

 

There are many ways to speak up, that is, to protest or fight back [3].  Someone of Einstein’s stature, assured a job at a prestigious university, is relatively free to be vocal. Moreover, his voice will generally be heard. 

Many immigrants or citizens have no such cachet.  They very often need a job to support their family.  It might be very difficult for them to directly protest without risk of expatriation, vagrancy or jail. 

All of us, though, have access to some means of protest.  Some are subtle or clandestine, but they add to a social momentum that roils the ‘peaceful’ surface.  On Courage, A recent book by Angwin and Fields-Meyer explores the idea of “collective stubbornness.” [4]

An example of subtle ‘speaking out” is the Black porters who, while maintaining their job, sent encouraging messages through their body language.  And of course many people, Black and others, joined informal or secret social groups to fight segregation (and before that, slavery).  Church membership is often a conduit to ‘good trouble,’ to employ the concept of John Lewis.

We aren’t all Einstein.  We won’t be invited to give a speech.  That doesn’t mean we must be silent.  We each have a choice:  whether to do something that is plausibly effective, something that honestly addresses the concerns from both heart and mind, or to do nothing and become complicit, entering the carrot-and-stick trap of the four stages.

 

A terrible price

 

The rest of this essay, at the risk of grandiosity, paints a hideous picture.  I want to hammer home the point that someone who twists their mind to the point where evil is seen as good is broken.  They become both infected and deranged.  This 'invasion of the body snatchers' cements in stage four of  TCG, when the mind flips to accept illogic as logic and vice as virtue.  To reach this point of the malevolent metamorphosis is to go from loathing what you see in front of your very eyes to embracing it with ardor and obedience. 

The magnitude is on par with that classic, sardonic tale, Andersen's "The Emperor’s New Clothes": 

The emperor is clearly wearing no clothes.  But, wait!  Of course he is wearing clothes, the finest ones in the land!  Long live the Emperor!

In terms of racism:

Black people are clearly being targeted by vicious, brutal, wicked racism.  But, wait!  Of course they are not.  It’s White people who are the victims here!  Long live the Empire! Black people need to be kept in their place, by whatever means!

To achieve Andersen-esque status is to situate yourself within a wonderland of contradictions, an Oz of lies whose purpose is itself absurd--to stymie and befuddle your own ability to think rationally.

I am going to frame this tragic disfigurement from a number of angles, limning various tricks and traps that a person inflicts on their very being when they accept the devil's bargain.

 

Fracture

 

Suppose someone comes to America, as Einstein did, new to the scene.  Day after day, event after event, evidence of racism mounts.  Suppose this person, contra Einstein, chooses to stay silent.  How do they deal with guilt and eventually twist their conception of the world around in reverse, to see brazen wickedness as good, despite the outpour of daily cruelty.  On and on ...    

To perform such a ‘180’ requires setting up a triage system for every bit of social information that flows into the brain.  Bit by bit (double entendre intended), a person binds their mind in a harness of internal censors.  Maybe these censors are accessible at first, but after a while they trend liminal and finally fade into distant shadows.  They become alien to the ego, that is, the center of conscious awareness.  

Even so, the internal censors must still go about the task of managing data and suppressing pain.  The pain, too, tends to mounts.  Critical centers of expression--conscience, empathy, intuition and reason-- demand that the hiding, the cowardice, be rectified.  And yet, unless the silent person finally speaks out, the sins of silence continue to accumulate.  The result is a reactive increase in core tension, which in turn impels the need for more shadowy tricks and traps--more warrens of deceit, more machinery of suppression.

To function under so much pressure, which arises from the furor in their own heart, a silent person eventually becomes an actor all the time, weighed down by a duplicity that becomes more automatic every day, evolving to compartmentalize and suppress--until, as far as the surface level knows, nothing is going on down below.  All is just fine.  Both inside the mind and out in the world.

Dendritic ruts

In terms more scientific, repetitive behavior digs ruts in the neural network, the learning mechanism of the brain..  The more you hide, the deeper the dendritic ruts.  This  leads not only to entrenchment but deformation:   cognitive filters twisted into convolutions to register illogic as logic. 

The person who has fled so thoroughly has successfully repressed a huge chunk of who they are. Containment of such magnitude inflicts a state of psychological fracture, an enforced degradation of a once truthful person into total ignorance.

This ugly process is not like flipping a switch.  To alter yourself so titanically requires a campaign of ceaseless and enormous self-attack.  Think tectonic forces so mighty that they compress mud into rock, a surface where nothing gets through.  What was once semipermeable is now impenetrable.  Aspects of the psyche locked so far down they are no longer able to trouble the surface with what is good, honest and true.

 

Joy Dampening

 

Along with fracture, the transition to Orwellian silence deadens the ability to feel a special sort of joy.  This occurs because those parts of the mind responsible for core tension also elicit positive feelings, moods and passions--if they are not beaten down and chained away in a psychic dungeon.

It is special to know and feel that you are challenging darkness and embracing the light; that you are speaking out for justice.  It can be exhilarating, 'let's get up and dance,' or simply manifest as deep-seated content.  

Imagine such self-worth, a sort that has nothing to do with how much money you have, what kind of car you drive, or what you look like in comparison to standards of pulchritude set by the beauty industry.  Soulful candor nurtures a kind of contentment that fights back against corporate advertising--the mind-massaging marketers, funded by billions of dollars, who actively work to break a populace into demographic sectors of neurotic consumers--insecure people who need to buy products to feel good.  Everyday, all the time, instead of striving to make us healthier, more ethical citizens, our economic system hawks a shallow lifestyle of sugary glitz and petty vanities [5].

A harmonious mind is an exultant accomplishment, ushering in a wellspring of creativity and profundity.  Such a virtuous state honors the foyers, parlors and mezzanines of the mind.  To treat yourself with such introspective, full-throated respect is utterly compassionate.  You become, in a way, your own soulmate [6]. 

But this isn't what silence is about.  Silence actively works to prevent a person from ever reaching such a wonderful place, or feeling such lovely passions and joys.

 

Power loss:  a bias against knowledge

To ‘know thyself’ brings knowledge--and knowledge is power.  However, if you deny yourself such joy and related wisdom, you deny yourself the ability to choose wisely; and you suffer a corresponding power loss.

Our society tends to associate higher awareness, including self-knowledge, with burden and woe.  It’s an old chestnut, represented in the Bible:

 

In much wisdom is much grief, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.

 

Anti-intellectualism serves Ignorance (short for ‘ignorance-based government’).  No dictator benefits from a person who seeks an accord of reason, conscience, empathy and justice.   Donald Trump infamously said, “I love the poorly educated.”   

Ignorance needs its Big Lies.  It needs citizens who are driven by passions that they themselves do no know how to work with in a healthy way.  There is an underlying dark reason, related to power, that professional therapy--which launches a healing, honest journey--is looked down on and seen as a stigma. 

Fear and hate are not necessarily bad.  Their expression is part of being human [7].  But when a dictator cultivates them to manipulate others, the goal is not liberation and flourishing for the target audience, but rather mind control and corresponding loss of freedom.  

Those who accept such demagoguery into their heart assimilate themselves into a mobilized mass.  They become a unit in the orchestrated march of swarm behaviors, where the conductor's baton is insidious propaganda and sophistic rhetoric.

 

Disrespect and hate

 

The triad of self-inflicted curses--fracture, joy-dampening, and power loss--conjoin into a searing accusation, which is the following:  the choice of silence is a choice to hate yourself.

These three curses are the result of a person basically telling their own heart to shut up, turning a blind ear to reason, and choking out the light.  Not an accident or aberration, it is a pugilism of seamless persistence until, crushed by the incessant effect, a fire within withers to a candleflame and then snuffs out. 

The goal is not only to annihilate the truth, but replace it with an impostor, the body of the dictator, his speeches and specious rationales.  The better half of the mind protests against such absurdity, so the silent person begins to hate their own conscience--and all the other parts of the mind that bring core tension.  

The silencer gets away with it, because they have the raw mental power to do so.  They suppress until they repress, through sheer intractable will.  They gets away with it, 'because they can,' the argument of the bully. 

A person pulled toward malevolence could speak up and thereby stop the descent, like Einstein did.  Some people do arrest their disintegration and rise up, breaking as if out of bondage.  Others, however, head deeper into the fog of silence, seeking the easy path, perhaps, while meeting a dark destiny on the road they took to avoid it.  

As I elaborate below, the silence of complicitous gravitation is anything but serene or a place of peace.

"Once more the Sith shall rule the galaxy and we shall have peace"
-- Star Wars III, Revenge of the Sith
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G92z8l5vxpQ

 

Tyrannizing yourself

 

To censor and condemn your own truth assessments is a violent, procrustean process.  You chop away at daily awareness, cutting away any sign or sound of truth so that a Big Lie can seen legitimate.   It's all about might-makes-right, or to quote the Republic, "Justice is the interest of the stronger."  

(If ego is the conscious part of a person as they move through the world, this can be phased as 'ego-makes-right').

Fracture.  Joy dampening.  Power loss.  Self-hate.    These add up to yet another frightful revelation:  to silence yourself is an act of tyranny.  It is analogous to how a dictator beats down opposition and hammers a dark, unforgiving message into the minds of worshipful masses.  A silenced person fractures their own being in a similar way.  They put up inner walls which mirror xenophobic, physical walls.  The inner walls 'keep out invaders' as harshly as as penal codes which establish segregation and apartheid.  

A silenced person mirrors the dictator they obey, by becoming a dictator over their own conscience.  The dictator kicks the silenced person into line, the silence person kicks themself in the heart.   

In the final stages of complicitous gravitation (TCG), a silenced person commits something like an act of self-murder.  They kill parts of themself, or try their best. 

As well, they forget that by going through the four stages of malevolent metamorphosis, they erected a façade of justice. 

The situation calls to mind a quote from Macbeth:

 

Stars, hide your fires, 

Let not light see my black and deep desires.

The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be

Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.

 

 

Macbeth intends to murder the king and take his place, but he doesn’t want his intentions revealed.  There is, however, a deeper symbolism.  The separation of the eye and the hand could be seen to represent parts of mind.  The eye, a surrogate for the conscience, sees that the hand has dark intent, but pretends all is good (‘nothing to see here’) and so “winks” in sly arrangement. 

Neither of the two parts of the mind--the eye or the hand--are a person’s legitimate conscience. That honest voice, the ‘better angel,’ has been buried and damned.  The fake conscience, the ‘eye,' participates in a pretense that everything is okay and good.  Nothing evil to see here, even when the hand takes up the knife and stabs away.

The implication of this allegory:  a silenced person is like Macbeth in that they kill the 'king'--which is their own better half--and replace it with darkness. 

Complicitous gravitation, however, goes further than Macbeth.  Macbeth, whispering to himself in the quote, is still aware of his evil behavior and intent.  His mental trick--setting up a false conscience to condone his evil deed--is like stage three of TCG, in which compartmentalization is beginning to fracture the mind and create a surrogate for conscience.    

In stage four of TCG, a person does not whisper to themself like Macbeth does to himself.  At stage four, a person is incapable of awareness of their deed at the level of vocal expression.  There is no request that the stars 'hide their fires.'  The stars have already been snuffed.  At stage four, the Macbethian has been replaced by the Orwellian.

 

An Inner Dracula

There is another aspect of silence that I want to touch on briefly, a sort of internal Dracula.  The fracturing of the mind, in addition to jailing away conscience and reason, demands new and prejudiced ways to process information.  Some part of the subconscious has to make this work--to keep the silenced person silent.  And for this laborious task, it demands a price.  The illusion of peace on the surface, the ‘comfortably numb,' exacts its pound of cerebral flesh.

A lot of brain fuel is needed to run a shadow machinery of continuous deceit, energy that could have gone instead to noble pursuits and hale flourishing.  Instead of honest, ethical behavior, the silenced person yields control to a subconscious eminence grise, a vampiric warden that regulates what happens on the surface level of awareness:  what the ego thinks, feels and perceives.

 

In Sum

 

A person who chooses silence when confronted with an evil empire, despite the urgings of their heart, becomes infected and deranged.

The push to avoid guilt, confusion, shame, and illogic, the components of core tension, leads to a devil’s bargain in pursuit of opportunity.  In consequence, grotesque changes occur:  fracture, joy-dampening, power loss, self-hatred and tyranny over the psyche.  

The sheer force of suppression--the might-makes-right of the ego--inflicts a kind of self-murder, for one part of a person chokes out another are redefines the whole.  Aspects of personality wither.   The cognitive function of the brain gets twisted full round to see evil as good.  Maintenance of this delusion is expensive and underhanded.  It requires a parasitic subconscious set up, a shadowy machinery centered on maintaining adherence to the empire. Awareness of what's going on 'deep down' gets shut out, an act of censorship which the ego not only condones but facilitates.   When the complicitous gravity is complete, the silenced person lives for the empire, bowing down and paying tribute, while seeking approval, opportunity and status.    

Our understanding of the human brain, circa early 21st century, is young.  But we have learned that our cerebral organ has different centers and, furthermore, that it coordinates across them.  Our neural network has such plasticity that it can, if called, create two or more personalities, ‘alters,’ as with multiple personality disorder.  If neurobiological links between parts of the brain are physically cut, such as the corpus callosum, the parts can act independently.  As well, dreams show that our brain will create worlds and people around the ‘I’ (our self-identity, what we see as who we are).

It is not an unfounded leap, then, to assert that when we choose silence, as defined in this essay, we initiate a gigantic disruptive process, one that is not only disordered but has malevolent transformative effects on who and what we are.  A silent person attempts to kill core tension and in so doing commits a Macbethian murder, one they deny, and may never again be able to do anything but deny.  It diminishes them perhaps forever.

We can, however, seek an honest relationship with the mansions of our own mind.  We can channel forth the ‘dark’ energies in healthy ways for ethical purposes, which results in great fonts of meaning and catharsis [8].

Speaking out against evil does not usher in a monolithic existence of ‘woe and grief.’  The knowledge that comes from speaking out includes self-knowledge, which elicits and enlivens joy and contentment. It is a kind of flourishing that is immeasurable in terms of currency.  You cannot attain such lovely ways-of-being from coin or social status.  To be honest and justice, while 'looking in the mirror' result in a relationship with yourself--and ultimately others--that is priceless.

Finally, I want to reiterate and underscore that 'speaking out' does not require a person to get on a podium like Einstein.  You can ‘speak out’ in many ways, and in so doing being a journey of good acts that can lead to a status, not of gold or throne, but well-earned virtue.  I’ll end with a koan-ish quote:

 

In art and dream, may you proceed with abandon.  In life, may your proceed with balance and stealth -- Patti Smith

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Footnotes

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project

2. Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, p.379

3. "Sustenance and Darkness," section III
https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2026/05/essay-sustenance-and-darkness.html

4. On Courage: how to be a dissident in an age of fear
https://www.acappellabooks.com/pages/books/393158/ami-fields-meyer-julia-angwin-ami-fields-meyer-julia-angwin/on-courage-how-to-be-a-dissident-in-an-age-of-fear

5. The 100 Simple Secrets of Happy People
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/100-simple-secrets-of-happy-people-the-david-niven?variant=32116414185506

6. "Sustenance and Darkness," section III 

7. "On Hate." 
https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2025/10/essay-on-hate.html

8.  "On Hate."  See the footnote references to NYT articles on this.

8/21-23  ... Continuous, labored edits but it still needs work.  I'll revisit it constantly for a while, and then off and on, as with my other essays.

[This essay has a limitation, namely, that the TCG model only addresses people 'in Einstein's position]

Born in '63, made it to 63.  Never would have thought.  I am grateful to the forces of fate.  

Micro-fiction: Amazing Myopia

 

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Do we dwell in self-delusion as a culture?  Yes.  Must we always?  No.  Ten thousand years in the future, or a million, the inhabits of Earth might look back at us in appalled shock at our self-centered myopia.  After all, why should a mere 5000 years of 'civilized' history determine everything we think and believe about the capability of a collective consciousness that can evolve indefinitely through the long stretch of universal life? 

Uuva Viperbless
9th petal of Coven Jessicadia

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Inspiration for this post comes from Gibbons et al:

https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2026/07/quote-great-constant-of-history.html

"Amazing Myopia" is based on the ideas in A Future of Angels (unpublished)

Poem: Possessed

 

Possessed

 

the haunt came over me,

what a frisson of emptiness.

shards of hope tinkling off.

there would be no aftermath.

no this or that.

loves, paths, myths, cares,

how my flesh took up space,

they all became a strand of time,

playable like a bent piano.

black and white,

spread and tender,

winding off

on a balustrade from Dr. Suess.

a clef so perilous and wise 

i would never figure it out,

or escape.

==================================

This poem was published in Rufous City Review in 2011.  Actually, according to my records, I published two poems titled "Possessed."  But I can't find the other, and my poor record keeping doesn't say where it was published.  

I am republishing more of my older poems on this blog, because I feel my future is uncertain, largely due to the death of US democracy.  I'm an old man.  Grief is painful.  So is incarceration.  

I hope my poems can be of worth, in some positive way, to others.  They have provided me with catharsis and sublimation as I rage at the stupidity of human conformity and its horrific effects.  They have helped me to develop both worldview and philosophy.  In the depths of despair, I have the ongoing cry of the poems, their salvation.

Poem: Rogue

 

Rogue

 

this aching planet,

 

a handful of healers cry daily

over its burning, excavated ribs,

 

where no wild things come.

 

crowds scurry in packed cities

amid obvious evil,

but only a few raise their heads.

 

one brave women

watches a wall of smiles

freeze-dry her pleas,

 

swallow them into cold throats

stainless as upscale refrigerators.

 

some teenagers

 

rage against the blood money of empire,

yet the streets ignore, ignore, ignore,

 

or laugh and hurl scorn

 

or ignore, ignore, ignore …

 

a few college students

call those who bow down locust and ants,

call the middle class pharisees,

call the rich posh swine

 

who soil pearls.

 

a sliver of authors, journalists, casters, artists and professors

make a calm case,

 

but no truth of any kind does anything

to steer the march of the scuttlers,

 

or impede the swarm.

================================

8/17... changed a word

8/16/26 ... eds off and on all day

It looks like this is a version of "Rogue Ants" (2023), which itself is a version of a draft I wrote long ago.  Probably I wrote this poem and Rogue Ants off that draft.  Most of the poems on this blog are re-works of old drafts, thousands of them.  It connects me with the me who wrote the poems, a historic sense of continuity and meaning.

NYT quote, Jesus vs "Tribute and dominance"

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Jesus says, "In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you ... "

Such an ethic is demanding. Few of us live up to it. But the problem with adherents of the modern right is not just that they don’t live up to it; the issue is that they detest it. To treat the foreigner residing among us as well as we treat our native-born is derided as suicidal empathy. The Trump administration glorifies cruelty toward the immigrant, the stranger, the weak and the poor. It takes money from Medicaid to cut taxes for the rich. It threatens the destruction of whole civilizations. The modern right is built on the logic of tribute and dominance.

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Ezra Klein, Christopher Nolan's Trojan Horse
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/02/opinion/christopher-nolan-odyssey-elon-musk.html

Regarding the poems

 The poems don't like you and they especially don't like me.  "What are you doing," they ask, "pretending to hear?"

Poem: Inventor Reflects

 

Inventor Reflects

 

the higher you go, the less you breathe,

and the more beautiful the air.

a why beyond dirt and sweat,

peace mulled by floatation,

reclusive as Lao Tzu’s clouds.

 

nerve endings took eons

to sprout out of bacteria and perceive this.

more quickly we ruined our awe

by inventing flight.

 

we praise no god now,

only mechanical wings.

whether brilliant or damned,

only the angels we replaced could say.

too many tricks

have been played on our ideals.

 too much thimblerigging

between judges and thieves

knotted in warrens

in the switchbacks of the metropolis.

 

we weren’t created

to see where we’ll go,

only to get there lost.

to suffer chains of puzzles

in doglegs of whys.

the gods need us

to unfurl like opium rings,

waft from their fickle rush.

 

if you invent something

it’s just the gods

using you as a mirror.

you’ll be dropped

and then no more insight,

just a brief ritual of shatters:

the giving of yourself

to the glow.

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Icarus theme... 

This poem was originally published in Samizdat in 2013.  I have started re-publishing poems on this blog, as well as adding the new ones.  A big part of it is the end of the USA as I knew it, and my concern that I will be incarcerated.  I am, too, in my 60s, and could die of natural causes, exacerbated by grief and anxiety at the loss of the democracy and freedom I knew all my life. 

Micro-fiction: New Perspective

 

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All I was asking people to do was to consider a new point of view:  what if 5,000 years, the approximate age of human civilization, was not a lot of time?  What if it were a mere blip in the consideration of where and how civilization can go, how it could evolve, given that the universe will continue to unfold for billions of years?

Just by changing their point of view in that way, even for a second, many people found new hope and purchase in their own identity.  They became an expression in something vast, something that listened and watched their every behavior for clues on what could happen far into an utterly magical future.

What is clear is this:  the mental aspect of the Universe is just starting to Bloom; and each person is a part of that, especially if they have the courage to be aware.

Ayestasya Ulswofe, Petal of the Passionance,
Blue Butterfly Green Spider Coven

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This derives from the characters and philosophy presented in my unpublished novel, A Future of Angels

Quote, "I remember, too, the stories of older women who marched ... "

 

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I remember, too, the stories of older women who marched on August 9, who reminded younger activists that many of them had taken to the streets over the objections of their husbands and fellow male comrades. They explained that at the time they did not have the language to explain how race, class and gender intersected; they just knew how sexism felt in their bodies.

By the time we were marching for a new set of rights, they had gifted us the language and analysis to describe how race, class and gender shaped women’s experiences. Their stories also showed us that sexism did not sit neatly outside the struggle against apartheid: women could stand alongside men in a liberation movement while still having to fight for equality with those same men.

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“Women’s Day in South Africa turns 70 with equality still out of reach”-- Sisonke Msimang

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/8/9/womens-day-in-south-africa-turns-70-with-equality-still-out-of-reach

Poem: Red Squirrel

 

Red Squirrel

 

sputter and chip,

rebuke me with variants

of raucous croon,

 

you perky piccolo of fuss,

high on a spruce,

helming azure.

 

if i could shimmy, bristle,

and cackle like you,

besotted by the spirit of

 

Puck,

 

would i, too, dash

from my own moods,

a child lost to daredevilry,

 

and forget the madness

of the mean world

through the quicksilver roan

 

of my flips?

=================================

This poem was originally published in Bolts of Silk in 2012.  I have started re-publishing poems on this blog.  A big part of it is the end of the USA as I knew it, and my concern that I will be incarcerated.  I am, too, in my 60s, and could die of natural causes, exacerbated by grief and anxiety at the loss of the democracy and freedom I knew all my life.