Happy New Year everyone! I hope your year is starting well. Here’s the first poem I’ve written in 2023, accompanied by some AI generated Art (generated based on lines from the poem).

A Tyranny of Symbols

We are like catapults casting symbols across a chasm

At war with abstractions

Where common sense is not so common

And the least common denominator is always left in the back alley to rot in the fifth of our own making.

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For what reason did we choose the sounds and muscles that make the word love,

Or truth,

Or creature,

Or tide?

For language is a tide,

With words in and out of fashion

Eb, and flow,

Push, and pull,

All tides have a time of their choosing

And yet so many choose to attack the waters with fist and blade and hate,

Until knuckles are bloody at the long lingering task of

---

Control

Order

Sameness

Identity

---

What symbol flung upon your body or taken by choice has ever brought you wholeness

Instead of fracture?

---

I

Am

This.

You

Are

That.

---

Lines in the sand for which we dare not cross

We collect symbols to adorn our naked bodies

Rather than recognizing our rapturous reality,

That

We

Are

Star

Stuff

---

We fling like catapults,

Into the dark,

Hoping for illumination

But instead,

We become,

Weapons of mutually assured destruction.

---

We set words on fire,

Arguing to unburden ourselves

Shift the load from our shoulders

And weigh down another

To slow their speech,

Their motion,

Their agency.

---

Grasp the sand,

Hold it tight,

Do not let slip a single grain

Or risk

Unmasking

The arbitrary

---

The finger pointing to the moon,

Is not the moon.