Index for Anemochory:
Item 4 of Tome Of Stars
Anemochory: Introduction
Anemochory, from the botanical term for wind-borne seed dispersal, is the fourth item of Tome of Stars. It is a metaphor for a most desolate phase of emotional scattering, spiritual disorientation, and theological anguish. Sporogenesis was the quiet sealing of the self, but Anemochory unleashes fragile seeds and sprouts into a merciless world, flinging fragments of the poet forth in compulsion as much as hope. The section lacks any cohesive arc. It documents a mind unmoored, careening between desperate hope, damnation, and emotional nullification. Even its dance opening, Tillana, spirals into frenzy and ruin. It concludes not with wild frenzy, but with its inverse in the poem Absolute 0.
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The “Item” structure of Tome of Stars is inspired by the recital program of a classical Indian dance called Bharatanatyam. The beloved of this collection, among her many, many talents spanning arts, languages, and the sciences, was a dancer of this tradition. Bharatanatyam became tightly associated with the Stargirl in the author’s mind, and when assembling this collection, he decided to attempt to structure it following the margam, the structured program for performances of this dance form (“margam” translated as “path” or “journey”). He did this in two ways. First, Tome of Stars was divided in six Items (how the different dances in the recital are typically called in English). These six sections are both thematic and chronological, spanning the beginning of the relationship (Item 1: Anthesis, the flowering) through its dissolution to the poet’s final unending, prolonged grief and emotional devotion (Item 6: Scripture). Within each item, the actual elements of a margam show up as individual poems titled by the item name. In these sonnets, the poet tries to meld traditional interpretations of the dance item with elements of their romance, separation, and/or aspects of the writer and/or the Stargirl. More can be found in the video linked in the Background section.
Dance, Stars!
Dance, stars!
Grace bright cosmic souls,
endless hearts
within lost skies.
Art flames upon star chains!
There lies Void’s
sacred madness,
a sweet, shattered
space of truth-pain.
Thus, kiss song-joy, magic mortal!
Beneath worlds,
divine, sublime gods
shall dawn tears
in wild touch!
I'll begin the analysis of verse with a poem that is an outlier in the collection.
"Dance, Stars!" was not written so much as it was assembled as poetically as possible from a word frequency breakdown of the remainder of the collection. (Seriously)
After finishing the first drafts of Tome of Stars, I did various breakdowns of the text searching for literary "tics", both known and unrecognized. Many automated tools exist to perform such work (which I’ve used for my novels in the past), and indeed I found I had even in this (relatively smaller as compared to my novels) collection a set of repeated phrases and words that could not be justified in their repetition solely by the needs of the poem but which likely find their deep roots in my subconscious. It is impossible to root out all such verbal traps, but one can reduce their occurrence.
As part of this, I had one such tool generate a word and phrase frequency list. Here is the word list from an earlier version of Tome of Stars:
dance 22, stars 22, bright 20, grace 20, cosmic 19, soul 19, spirit 18, endless 18, hearts 18, within 18, lost 18, skies 15, art 15, flame 15, star 15, chains 14, lies 13, void 12, sacred 12, madness 12, sweet 12, shattered 12, space 12, truth 11, pain 11, thus 11, kiss 11, song 11, joy 11, magic 11, mortal 11, beneath 11, worlds 11, divine 10, sublime 10, gods 10, shall 10, dawn 10, tears 10, wild 10, touch 10, shine 9, stellar 9, timeless 9, embrace 9, galaxies 9, kissed 9, beauty 9, sought 9, bond 9, deep 9, hope 9, spun 9, born 9, broken 9, dream 9, apart 9, prayer 8, transcendent 8, seek 8, shame 8, seas 8, spirits 8, stage 8, doom 8, embraced 8, fate 8, cruel 8, thousand 8, beyond 8, silent 8, darkness 8, glow 8, failed 8, flesh 8, break 8, chant 7, warped 7,, nights 7, sing 7, verse 7, pure 7, dread 7, fairy 7, hold 7, whispered 7, silence 7, distant 7, blind 7, dreams 7, steps 7, sight 7, sleep 7, sea 7, stargirl 7…..
The phrase list was most useful for exact reuse sins, prompting some reconsiderations and rewrites of some sonnets. The word frequency list also prompted changes, although this was more challenging. However, as I was looking at the list, my mind started stringing the most frequent words together into phrases. Before I realized it, I was composing a poem with the absurd constraints of (1) keeping the frequency order as much as possible and (2) not introducing any other nouns or verbs, but allowing myself to introduce articles, prepositions, and other elements (and at times modifying the words—changing singular to plural, verbing nouns, etc.). I mostly kept to the rules.
The end product shocked me in being not only a poem I enjoyed reading, but also one that felt like an eccentric but not inaccurate encapsulation of the collection. I then decided to include it as an Epigraph and Foreword, inaugurating the book.
Studying this poem itself (for my own meanings and word choice, etc.) is an analysis of a distilled version of Tome of Stars, the context lost in a mapping of meaning to numerical occurrence. The word choice is built into the manner in which the poem was created and reflects, in a direct but distorted manner, all the verse that is to come (that I do plan to analyze). To expand on why these words appear, and in the order they do, and what it means vis-à-vis the author's intent, would be to try to distill the planned poem-by-poem analysis into a single essay.
That I will not do. Instead, I'll leave it as a preview — a “teaser trailer” for what comes — as it both summarizes and also resamples to near meaninglessness what comes after, whatever my efforts to imbue a loaded word list with its own life.
Tillana
now faster, faster: faster! flitter quick!
it pulls, it drinks! who can’t this beast outrun?
now out the pit—i’m out the pit! the pit!
bones: mother, brother, wife, and mangled son.
each gesture studied in a sacred text.
each movement practiced till the muscles burn.
through mazes where the mind becomes perplexed,
to flee dark dungeons, never to return.
flashed lightning! see you! touch-kiss! love-be! now!
forbidden! steps on stage with razored pains.
spin-leap! sign-gesture! try again. somehow!
break-fall! fail-lost-you, weeping in these chains!
the energy bleeds out. i cannot rise.
a dancer buried deep in empty skies.
A tillana is a dance portion near the end of a margam, a “grand finale” in western vocabulary and thought, although other more graceful elements typically end the recital (e.g., the mangalam). A tillana is a heavily rhythmic piece, fast and dextrous, showing off the dancers’ skills and bringing the performance to a celebratory climax. Opening the item Anemochory in Tome of Stars, Tillana is indeed fast and dextrous in words and topics. But here it is reinterpreted to be more catastrophic than celebratory. Moving from a focus on the Stargirl or her divine avatars, it focuses on a dancer who represents the poet. The opening is frantic and frenetic, punctuation odd, grammar rushed, capitalization missing. The first quatrain is a panicked flight from horror and a monster in “the pit.” The dance is abstracted to refer to the living dance of the poet in his thoughts and behaviors to “outrun” this monster, the sins and atrocities of his ancestors, the pathology of his own person in absorbing abuse and damage. It is a desperate dance, where “the muscles burn” and “the mind becomes perplexed” “to flee dark dungeons.” The third quatrain introduces the Stargirl into the dance, with “flashed lightning” and “love,” but their disastrous failure as a couple leads to a “fall” and “weeping in these chains!” In the end, the dancer collapses in exhaustion as “the energy bleeds out.” He cannot rise again, “buried deep in empty skies,” basically his fall from grace.
Divine Mud
Beneath this grin, my grave of secrets rots,
Both vile and pure, each thread too tightly grasped,
A knotted web where truth and silence fought,
Too dark for light, too precious to unclasp.
Agleam within the ruins of my mind,
A single shard shines bright amongst the waste:
A sublime rose once shattered in my crimes,
Revealed as glow no gloom could ever fade.
For love is godly—bright and black the same,
A mixture rough of mortal mud divine.
Where sorrow mangles joy, yet gestates flame,
Jailed soulmates thrust within the genes’ design.
We build from what we break towards a light,
Or so we dream in fever through our night.
This is a sonnet about the broken beauty of being human, where rotting secrets, “both vile and pure,” are “too dark for light” but “too precious to unclasp.” He turns to a remaining shattered fragment of his relationship with the Stargirl, having preserved “a single shard” that “shines bright amongst the waste” within his mind. With this he places even the broken remnants of what he remembers of her far above everything else in his experience, one that will be with him until his end, “revealed as glow no gloom could ever fade.” In this memory of loss, he blames himself, as the glowing shard is “a sublime rose once shattered in my crimes.” The poem then notes the contradictions in human nature, especially human love, which he describes as “godly—bright and black the same/A mixture rough of mortal mud divine,” where human spirits are jailed and subject even as “soulmates” to the “gene’s design” in manipulating them towards reproduction (calling back to Algorithmic Hearts). It ends with a degraded hope as lovers “build from what we break towards a light,” but it is a “dream in fever through our night,” calling into question whether there is truly any possibility for transformation or redemption.
Paused Over Email Draft, March 2024
Truth battles terror in a fractured mind,
I labor wild to break hell-hammered chains.
Long-cancered code, for vampires designed,
Has cost me you and bought me lasting strain.
I’ve borne your silence, flinched at bitter words,
Envisioned every tint of your disdain.
My prayer for kindness is, of course, absurd,
For miracles won’t grace my damned domain.
Your art at wounding mocks all mortal scales;
Cruel January’s poison ever burns.
Before your gates, I tremble naked, frail,
All armor useless, spirit, heart upturned.
And if again your blade plunged through my chest,
I’d kiss you with my last breath, ever blessed.
After his attempt to reconcile with the Stargirl met with complete disaster and rejection in 2020, it would be four years before he dared contact her again. The first few years saw his emotional life utterly comatose, as he struggled with the terrible wound he had received from her. Major health issues, cancer and surgery, then reoriented his mind. He realized his time was short, and decided even if she were to wound him again as she did, he would be ready to accept it, even joyfully: “if again your blade plunged through my chest/I’d kiss you with my last breath, ever blessed.” Indeed, after a fearful initial consideration of reaching out again as “truth battles terror in a fractured mind,” and a realization that nothing that has happened to him has been blessed as he would have imaged it (“miracles won’t grace my damned domain”), he nevertheless steps forward, pausing over the email draft to her “naked, frail/All armor useless, spirit, heart upturned.” He comes to a place where he considers wounding from her a blessing in comparison to not having anything of her in his life. And so he sent the message, but reaped only that cursed silence and not even the blessing of her strike.
Doppelgänger
Thorned years we felt the Stargirl’s glow withdraw,
And stumbled over darkened, filthy streets,
Where shattered husks in neon shadows crawl,
In waste and wreckage, disemboweled and weak.
A silhouette appeared, the form her twin,
A Delhi dancer, nimble, small, refined.
But gloom and distance hid the face within,
While every motion split open my mind.
My legs gave way. The earth lunged drunk. I swayed.
Mad neurons flared. Before her ghost, I kneeled.
But nearer came the farther went her shade;
An unenchanted mortal was revealed.
Destroyed, I trembled, struggling to rise.
A stranger passed as rain wept from the skies.
This sonnet recounts a real event. The poet was walking in the streets of New York City when he spied a figure far at the end of the block (the east-west direction where the blocks are very long, some approaching 1000 feet or 300 meters). His brain calculated one thousand inputs — the figure’s shape, stride, height, glimpse of long dark hair — and computed it was a high similarity to the Stargirl, “the form her twin”, a “Delhi dancer, nimble, small, refined.” But “gloom and distance hid the face within”, and he could not be certain of the identity of the figure, but the resemblance was enough to “split open my mind.” The neurological effect was something he had never experienced and only read in older novels (disbelievingly) in occurrences of fainting over emotionally powerful events. However, the poet’s “legs gave way,” “the earth lunged drunk” and he fell to his knees, losing control of his body. He didn’t faint, but held onto consciousness long enough to see her approach and witness the magic dispelled. When he could see her in more detail, the differences between her and his former lover were more prominent. The rush of neural firing that overwhelmed his system subsided as she passed, and he struggled to rise and continue his way through the city.
Shrooms
Youth’s hellscape of abuse befouled my brain,
Dank taint infecting all I’ve dared adore.
Survival tools engender minds insane,
Intoxicate each action warped for war.
When cancer’s tendrils slithered through my veins,
I sought the shaman-wisdom fungi mold—
Rewire neurons, sunder trauma’s chains,
Excise your haunting shade and free my soul.
My hopes and fears imbibed the mystic blue,
As spirit tunes transformed the yurt with song.
But nothing shattered. Visions stayed askew.
My monsters mocked as chemistry went wrong.
If death could bring me life, may ego die.
I’d break myself, life’s fragments mix, and fly.
This sonnet recounts a trip to the Netherlands prior to his cancer surgery. While he did not fear death (and in fact continuously longed for oblivion), he certainly feared more suffering, as his soul was already burnt and blistered from years of hurt. He had done some extensive research on the studies of how psychedelic compounds showed promise in connecting regions of the brain that do not normally communicate (explaining common reports of tasting colors and other odd effects of hallucinogens). The idea was that by connecting disparate regions, new pathways in the brain could be forged to counter established and unhealthy patterns (as seen in prolonged grief disorders, for example). He wanted to “rewire neurons, sunder trauma’s chains/Excise your haunting shade and free my soul.”
It should be noted that this would be a kind of erasure of who he was, part of “ego death” and the construction of a new person. In this he would be “killing” in a sense his feelings for the Stargirl, and the idea deeply troubled him. And it would be the only time he would ever try to do that. The other thing drawing him to this would be to help him move beyond his past trauma and the “chains” it had put on him.
But he was quite terrified of losing his mind. His great grandmother had died in an asylum. His grandfather was an alcoholic, as were his mother and her brother. Psychosis, addiction, and life-destroying choices were part of his and his family’s history. However, he felt he was losing his mind anyway, despairing of healing after years of ineffective therapy (see Weak Magic).
Thus, his “hopes and fears imbibed the mystic blue” as he drank the shroom tea. And…nothing happened. He had spoken with the retreat leader about what he was trying to accomplish, and the man had recommended the “heroic dose” to utterly scramble his mind, achieve true and complete “ego death.” But the dose seemed ineffective. So he took another heroic dose. And still nothing.
Thus while others in the yurt reported mystical experiences, the poet found himself remaining exactly who he was. No ego death. No alteration of his reality as “nothing shattered. Visions stayed askew. My monsters mocked as chemistry went wrong.”
His medical and biochemical knowledge led him to believe that the hallucinogenic compound (psilocin, the active metabolite of psilocybin) had been degraded in the preparation he received and that the reported mystical experiences of the 10 or so others at the retreat were a placebo psychedelic response. Of course, it is also possible that he was a mutant in the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor, although he considers this highly unlikely. He won’t know unless he gets his genome sequenced or tries shrooms again. The experience seemed “fate” to him, however, and he decided not to risk it in another attempt.
He still longs in many ways and many times to be free, where he can “break myself, life’s fragments mix, and fly.” But the other thing stopping him is that he has come to the point, like in the sonnet Paused Over Email Draft, March 2024, where he considers the daily suffering he feels from the loss of the Stargirl a “sacred wound,” one that he would rather bear than erase, although in times of acute pain he does reconsider this position.
Forsaken
The world decried our union, shamed our hearts;
Chagrined, we broke our trysts and wronged their rites.
Yet passion tore frail chastity apart,
And so we shamed each kiss in cloaks of night.
I sang starlit soliloquies of hope,
Each note betrothal that would long sustain;
You matched my verses—meter, rhyme, and scope—
And wept of ruin should our union wane.
Then August brought its bitter harvest home;
Your warmth froze into winter’s wicked hell.
Through countless seasons, I then pled and roamed,
Your silence sounding in dementing spells.
What cosmic cancer cursed love’s light to hate?
I burn! Dissolved, unmade in caustic fate.
This sonnet doesn’t break new ground, and is in fact based on the contents of a journal entry. It basically summarizes his past and present (from his eyes), but then cries to the cosmos asking for relief. He asks what “cosmic cancer” has warped the affections she once felt for him, the agony of it feeling like a constant burning, where his is “dissolved, unmade in caustic fate.”
No One
There’s no one here. I choke on noxious blight.
No stellar shine to quench an endless grief.
Alone within a vast, unfeeling night,
No heart to hear, no grace to grant relief.
Perhaps this ache is borne by every soul,
An emptiness behind each painted grin.
Our grand performance hides abyssal holes,
All bonds a sham, each spirit caged therein.
You were the bridge I walked to reach the stars,
But halfway ’cross, the piers you bade destroyed.
Dear Bright One, now I’m left with only scars,
Condemned to twilight’s cold, uncharted void.
Release me now!
What prayer must I recite? What spell?
My Stargirl’s gone! All else I know is hell.
This sonnet tries to convey the feeling of utter aloneness the poet often felt. In the first quatrain he describes the state where the lack of “stellar shine to quench an endless grief” is “a noxious blight” devoid of love or mercy. He continues in quatrain two to wonder if he were not so unique in this pain as he often supposed. He had felt for most of his life that people’s interactions in society were terribly superficial, to him appearing empty, and therefore if true, many people must be feeling some form of loneliness as he did. In the third quatrain he blames the Stargirl explicitly, not as a judgment, but reflecting on her judgement of him. She was his salvation, the bridge walked “to reach the stars.” In his mind, she chose to destroy that bridge while he crossed, leaving him “with only scars” and “condemned.” The poem concludes with abject begging where he pleads for release from this state of her absence that he likens to hell, itself.
The Nash Transform
“Be who you are”—a creed that pleads for pain,
For what fool asks a serpent not to bite?
Should we restrain, or let them roam unchained,
Those inner demons filled with obscene spite?
For as I question what is sane and true,
My love for you becomes a blurred mirage.
Is adoration just a limbic brew,
A dopamine delusion none dislodge?
Still, love for you remains my guiding flame,
A beacon through dark chaos in my heart.
I climb out sludge, out doubt, out endless shame,
And seek a world in which we never part.
But is this quest a beacon or a lure,
A madness vile disguised as passion pure?
Here the poet begins by mocking contemporary “self-actualization” movements to “be yourself” to find peace and happiness. Because he considers himself inherently corrupted (Once upon a Time poems, ur a lost person, Original Sin, and others), he scoffs at the idea that this approach to life is a good one. What if one is a pedophile or serial killer? Or simply a screwed up person who will even unintentionally hurt others (reminiscent of Hurt by Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails). And of course, what is right and good is subjective, changing from culture to culture, age to age. Even over the life of a single person.
“Insanity is relative. It depends on who has whom locked in what cage.”
-Ray Bradbury, The Meadow (1947)
But this introduction is the prelude to a sharp self critique, where the poet interrogates whether his seemingly endless need and devotion to a woman who expressly despises him is not some kind of mental illness:
For as I question what is sane and true,
My love for you becomes a blurred mirage.
Is adoration just a limbic brew,
A dopamine delusion none dislodge?
After this questioning, he flips to the reality that no matter the truth, he is powerless to change how his consciousness reacts to her, the state of his being. He knows that he will never cease longing for their reunion: “Still, love for you remains my guiding flame.” But the final couplet returns to the question of insanity again. Is the “quest a beacon or a lure”, a “madness vile disguised as passion pure?”
It is here that the title is an integral part of the poem’s meaning. "The Nash Transform” refers back to the mathematician and economist John Nash who was the subject of the well-known biography and film, A Beautiful Mind. In mathematics, a transform is usually a function that maps one image to an altered image. This can be simply a repositioning, a sphere displaced to three-space. It can be much more “dramatic.” A sphere inverted, warped, taken from 3-space to a two-dimensional plane, etc. A Fourier transform is a subclass that maps time-based entities to frequency space. Examples occur in music, physics, and informational sciences. In this poem, the title refers to a transform of perception and behavior.
When John Nash “came back” from madness years later, he would explain that his delusions were always with him. He was not “sane” in any sense most people would call sane. But over decades he had recognized that certain delusions and his responses to them were labeled as insane by others. He acquired a lot of data and learned to not focus or act on those categories of his experience in the presence of others, and thus he could pass as sane.
“Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. At the present time I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists. However this is not entirely a matter of joy as if someone returned from physical disability to good physical health. One aspect of this is that rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person’s concept of his relation to the cosmos.” John Nash, Autobiographical essay, (1994).
“Nash believed in reason and logical proof, and in his biography he claims to have reasoned his way out of his delusions. He also says that it was like dieting, in that he did not allow himself to think about religious or political matters.” A Beautiful Illusion, Boston Review, 2002 (https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/alan-stone-beautiful-illusion/)
In that sense, the poet considers his own mind applying a “transform” to his thoughts, moving them, altering them, to map them to a specific space deemed “sane.” He wonders if he can achieve something like the state Nash created.
However, in his case, it would mean rejecting a life-changing affection for another human being, constantly relegating it to the trash heap of “bad thoughts.” He did indeed try this, but it was so painful, such a betrayal in a personal sense, he felt he was strangling his heart. He assumes many others would insist on such actions, that he needed “kill” her in his heart to be “sane” and stop the damage his prolonged grief was doing to himself, his career, and others. Perhaps once he had murdered his love for the Stargirl (assuming it could be done), he might be deeply diminished as a feeling and experiencing person, but he would be “free” to “live” a more “sane” life.
He doesn’t know. He has to date failed in that assassination of his psyche. He has failed to distract himself with work and art. He has failed to respond to therapies of different types. He failed to pharmacologically alter his mind. And now, he is both very tired and leaning to a devotion of persistent unrequited love, the “sacred wound.”
Who knows what time or a stroke will bring? His father’s personality changed dramatically after a stroke. Such things happen also with dementia. Brain damage might be his only path at this point. Perhaps extended suffering and emotional malnourishment will led to the death of love on their own. We are fragile creatures of flesh, blood, and hormones, our dualistic delusion of body and spirit so frequently embarrassed by harsh biological reality.
Yet many of us continue to persist.
Axios-Anaxios Redux
Synapses sing for stars through tempest hail,
Your voice a hymn that rings cross neural seas.
Acidic truths burn memories that fail:
The love you shined warped to antipathy.
You craved the worship spilling from my soul,
That marveled at your glory and your grace.
But when I failed to properly extol,
Contempt carved grooves into your chang’ling face.
Your thunderclap transform wreaked agony,
As malice swelled old voices of my shame.
Fiends branded me with horrored harmony,
Condemned unworthy, outcast ever-named.
For in your scorn, I’m broken endlessly;
My Stargirl hated, hates, and shall hate me.
Like ur a lost person, this sonnet narrates the deeply destructive internal self-perception of fundamental unworthiness on the part of the poet (“anaxios”). But it is a poem of contrasts, centering the adoration and respect the beloved once held for the poet (“axios” or “worthy” in Greek) with the inverse that came as an agonizing “thunderclap transform.”
He does something rare in his bitterness in the lines of this verse by directly critiquing the beloved. As he moved toward the point found in Last Letter, that poem ending with a conclusion that her love for him had been “a fairy tell misread,” here he begins that journey by prosecuting her responses to his affection (as found in Caniclades), where in the pain of their long separation, his person, his affections, became inadequate and scorned. Thus, he focuses on his perception that a central aspect of her “love” for him was in fact the opposite of the sentiment he considered in Pathless Lands (love held without return or even acknowledgment). Krishnamurti’s words echoed in his thoughts: “If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love.” He came to sense that her love was indeed predicated on his adoration, “but when I failed to properly extol/Contempt carved grooves into your chang’ling face.” Thus her affection would be withdrawn should she perceive him to love him inadequately. In fact, the beloved had once said to him specifically that if she thought he didn’t love her, should would stop loving him. He likely should have seriously considered her words, what they implied, but at the time he was too “love drunk” and full of faith, and honestly too perplexed by a sentiment that made absolutely no sense to him (clearly Tome of Stars would not exist if her were to be so characterized by a response to her clear hatred of him).
The poet writes the phrase “Contempt carved grooves into your chang’ling face.” In European folklore, a changeling was a supernatural being who magically took the place of a human (usually a child) that had been abducted by otherworldly entities. Stories of changelings (and often real-life mistreatment of children suspected to be changelings because of odd behavior or physical defects) center on the "uncanny valley" of the ancients, where the false child would mimic the behavior of the real child, but it would feel "off" or "wrong" to the parents and others. The poet dredges up this old idea in an effort to convey the “dark magic” effect on him of the beloved’s turn from love to hate. While others may provide psychological and “common sense” explanations for this change (and they have, as has the poet in his own mind), it remains true that all such explanations are stillborn in his emotions and occupy only an intellectual quadrant in his consciousness. The change from her adoration to antipathy, her obsession with him to vitriolic disinterest, and complete rejection and denigration of the bond they shared that she once thought of as transcendent, will forever remain unexplainable to his psyche.
He concludes the poem with the very real, daily reality of that change: “For in your scorn, I’m broken endlessly”. There is not a day that passes that he is not wounded by the loss of her affection and care for his person, for the dismissal of the idea of their coupled miracle at which they once marveled together. He then repeatedly chants in his mind (redux) another mantra, a dark and destructive one to his sense of self-worth: “My Stargirl hated, hates, and shall hate me.”
Infernitum
Ourselves betrayed, we let our union die;
Each chose to sever hearts that once loved true.
In agony, time crawls while spirits writhe,
Each moment pain eternal without you.
Is this Gehenna where I’ve ever roamed,
Slow-damned to anguish in a life of loss?
To wander, warped, insane, without a home,
A hollow ghost forever tempest-tossed?
Hell’s depths run deep, and deeper still descend,
For time is vast, and demons hone their art.
Each plague of pain, cruel torment without end,
Eternity to tear a mind apart.
Their leisure infinite, their pleasure slow—
Relive. Relive! Relive your loss below.
The poem is a report from Hell. The poet tries to convey the daily, step-by-step march through a torturous and torturing emotional landscape to which he has been condemned by her loss (note, written fifteen years after their separation). Here he is “Slow-damned to anguish” “to wander, warped, insane, without a home, A hollow ghost forever tempest-tossed.” Time loses meaning with “Is this Gehenna where I’ve ever roamed?” Eternal punishment need not be part of an incarnate flow of physical time, but could be the experiential state in a realm devoid of time. By the third quatrain, the poet is relaying his growing sense that rather than there being any deliverance, there is instead the reality that “Hell’s depths run deep, and deeper still descend”. His suffering, the demon’s tormenting him in this timeless hell show a diabolical joy in refining and inventing ways to inflict pain, where they will have “Eternity to tear a mind apart.” But every wound stems from the departure of the Stargirl, for their “slow pleasure” in torture is followed by the last line of the sonnet: “Relive. Relive! Relive your loss below.”
Unsent
At last the fumes have cleared, and I perceive
The serpents coiled beneath the fairy’s wings;
Such madness did my love-blind heart believe,
Drunk hope made sweet your venom’s bitter sting.
Dread deserts burn between us, dead and wide,
Abyss so vast no mortal quest dare ford,
Without redemption’s light to serve as guide,
Or stitch the angel butchered by your sword.
Unless you forge a light that hell can’t quench,
Renew the ransacked wastelands of my heart,
Then strangle every sound, satanic wench,
Allow my mangled spirit to depart.
But wait—don’t go! Dear gods, I’m rent! I plead!
Remain and mend the broken shards of me!
This sonnet is derived from a 2021 email the poet wrote in a fit of emotion, but then never sent. It is one of the few assertions of the poet’s own ego above his bond with the Stargirl, although the independence collapses pathetically at the end. Unsent presents the most bitter, angry, and vicious critique of the Stargirl’s actions in the collection. The poet “at last” perceives “the serpents coiled beneath the fairy’s wings.” Sobering up beyond his “love-blind heart” and “drunk hope,” he instead glimpses her “venom’s bitter sting.”
Thus he perceives the beloved as guilty of crimes against his heart, and in quatrain two metes out judgment. Speaking directly to the beloved, he tells her that her cruelty and indifference have created “dread deserts” that “burn between” them and are “dead and wide” with “abyss so vast no mortal quest dare ford.” He is saying that his terrible and prolonged wounding has psychically separated their beings. Only with “redemption’s light” (the transformative power of a merciful divinity) could she be “guided” back to him and the “angel butchered” by her “sword” be “stitched” (healed). This angel is nothing less than the miracle of their “coupled name” (as written in A Grand Unification Theory), the essence of the magical and transcendent “togetherness” they once had. He calls her a servant of the devil, and orders her not to speak to him (not a likely event post their breakup), commanding that she allow his “mangled spirit to depart.” In other words, just let life run its course and let him die alone. It is worth noting that the poet here is utterly lost in his own simulations and fantasy communications, acting in a bubble of his own emotional need of the Stargirl, who has made it abundantly clear with both prolonged silence and a single, rending communication that this separation between them is exactly what she wants.
All this bravado and drama is seen to be an empty shell in the final couplet. Instead of nailing this new thesis to the doors of her temple, his ego shatters. He loses all sense of anything to do with his own justice and drops to her feet begging that she “don’t go!” because he is “rent”. He begs her not to leave, not to remain silent, and he collapses this supposed impassable desert to nothing as he pleads for her to “remain and mend the broken shards of me.”
The actual email was equivalent to the first three quatrains of the sonnet, the final couplet his deepest reality and the reason the email remained on his computer, forever unsent.
Heaven Failed
What justice finds its crown in endless pain,
With hell’s inferno searing souls and skin?
The stench of anguish, infinite, profane,
Mars righteousness and gestates cosmic sin.
And if in heaven’s gleam I found a place,
Yet heard crazed horrors howling in the fire,
What joy could be endured, what peace embraced,
If bliss were framed by torment’s flaming pyre?
Must Paradise warp love in heartless wombs,
Build beings blind to agony and cries?
Such heaven’s less a garden than a tomb,
A sick, sadistic space, strangled by lies.
And should hell vanish via heaven’s will,
Would trauma from life’s hell consume us still?
In Heaven Failed, which is the title of an unfinished novel the poet began and abandoned, the poet’s long wrestling with the morality of the standard Christian mythos synergizes with his own long torment in losing the Stargirl. Feeling he is in some kind of emotional hell, his mind cannot help but turn to the theological idea of eternal punishment. He realizes that it is not compatible with any idea of decency, let alone a “loving Creator.” It is not even compatible with basic justice. To his heart, the mere existence of hell would render the entire cosmic order tainted, even heaven. Thus he considers the impossibility of being in a paradise that existed alongside a realm of eternal torment: “What joy could be endured, what peace embraced/If bliss were framed by torment’s flaming pyre?” Such a concept of heaven he declares to be “a sick, sadistic space, strangled by lies.”
With the concluding couplet, however, he goes beyond the moral bankruptcy of heaven and hell and questions the possibility of joy and peace in an eternal realm when there has existed so much pain and injustice in the cosmos. The poet thereby reaches a point discussed some in previous poems where he feels he would rather utterly cease to exist, obtain oblivion, rather than continue in any afterlife as conceived in any religion. Certainly he would not wish to exist in a reality where the horrors of hell were allowed to be. He also cannot conceive of an afterlife that is bearable with the memories of “trauma from life’s hell.”
Original Sin
I never dared unlock the hatch hell-bound,
Rank chamber chaining terrors dread sealed tight.
I shook you’d see the unmanned slave befouled,
Warped creature shaped in shadow, scorned by light.
You burst before my sight, a blazing sun,
Full potency of womanhood in bloom.
My flesh, my mind—coherency undone.
Sly ancient codes—to love you was my doom.
Yet madness festered in my blighted brain.
I fled the darkness, frantic to be whole.
The hooks of demons could not be restrained.
I failed the fight and shattered my own soul.
I sought the stars; to depths was slung anew.
Far less the fall, the greatest loss was you.
Original Sin revisits the ideas in Once upon a Time, Part 1 and its concluding couplet: “Each poisoned cell is marked for the abyss.” This poem considers how he could not share with the Stargirl his warped past, as he “shook you’d see the unmanned slave befouled/Warped creature shaped in shadow, scorned by light.” The worst fate, the most cursed existence for him, would be that in which she viewed him with disrespect, even revulsion for who he was. The rending agony is that his flaws led her to see him with revulsion, anyway, writing to him after his 2020 letter: “I am repulsed.” It was as if he knew the reality of his original sin.
The concept of original sin, one the poet rejects as immoral, especially when combined with the idea of eternal punishment, is that humanity’s first disobedience of God in the Garden of Eden tainted all subsequent generations of humans, poisoning their nature and biasing them further toward inequity. For the poet, it is not primordial distortion, but his formative abuse that distorted his nature, “stained him,” and made him grotesque and fundamentally unworthy of respect or of love.
In that sense, while not explicitly stated, his belief, as seen in ur a lost person (“Filth-ruined, ghastly, shattered shard apart. Depart from me—run, each of you, I plead.” and “fare better that I’d never drawn a breath”), is that he shouldn’t exist, but as he does, he should stay away from people lest he hurt them. The second quatrain explains how this sense was made impotent because of the power the Stargirl had over him, and “to love you was my doom.” In the third quatrain he then shows how there was a battle in his subconscious, to love the Stargirl but to stay ahead of the “beast” “in the pit” (Tillana), rendered in this sonnet as “I fled the darkness, frantic to be whole.”
However, he fails and falls to his ruin: “The hooks of demons could not be restrained.I failed the fight and shattered my own soul.” This is explained because “I sought the stars.” He reached for something much more worthy, the light of the Stargirl, and as Once upon a Time, Part 3 notes, for “one brief eon” he experienced the holiness of that radiance. His inherently unworthy and corrupted nature (original sin), however, destroyed that. And so he fell from the height of the stars.
The poem ends by noting that losing “heaven,” the realm of the Stargirl, was not the greatest loss. That greater loss was losing her.
Owned
Through flesh, the surgeon’s silver blade descends,
Cartographer excising tumor’s trail.
I walked new paths where hurt and healing blend,
In woodland’s quiet breath, my thoughts set sail.
I saw I’d locked life’s torment ocean deep.
I’d labored long to flee from stain and flame.
In frantic works, my pain found restless sleep,
Eluding madness, drowning endless shame.
Now wise with sorrow, grasping full my plague,
I curse the gods and their psychotic scourge.
What past had saved me then condemned my way;
You left me through damnation’s deadly dirge.
But love’s no choice, nor bound by what you do.
I’m doomed, Stargirl, to ever live for you.
Owned comes from a time after the poet’s cancer surgery, when, as he would write in Gender Affirming Care, “what made me mate was ripped out through my core.” He is now unmade as a man in many senses, and this is a gut punch to him as now it is impossible for him to be the beloved’s physical partner in core biological realities (ignoring the reality that she would never wish to see him again).
His surgical wounds still very much healing, he took long walks (to stave off blood clots), and his “thoughts set sail” in those isolated times, somewhat like what had happened during the pandemic isolations. He extended those insights, realizing that the majority of his life - a very high achieving one marked by accomplishments, degrees, and periods of respect in his field - were a charade (an idea to come again in Absolute 0). His manic work ethic existed not for love of what he did, but to occupy his mind to prevent his trauma from devouring him (“in frantic works, my pain found restless sleep, Eluding madness, drowning endless shame”).
But this insight brings mostly bitterness, not peace. He feels powers beyond his control (symbolically rendered as “the gods”) had wrecked him and set him on a course of certain failure in life. He realized that those adaptations that had allowed him to survive horrific abuse were maladaptive outside of that abuse (“What past had saved me then condemned my way”, an idea reflected in Paused Over Email Draft, March 2024, with “Long-cancered code, for vampires designed/Has cost me you and bought me lasting strain”). He fruitlessly “curses” these fates, blaming them for the loss of the Stargirl.
The poem ends not with curses, however. He returns inevitably, without intention, often fighting against the force, to a nexus of emotional reality: “I’m doomed, Stargirl, to ever live for you.” His love is something he has no control or power over. Not even her actions, however hateful or cruel, can ultimately budge his emotional center of mass.
He is owned in an ultimate sense.
Absolute 0
Absolute 0: the heat death of the universe at time’s
eternal end where entropy reigns high
unmakes the ’verse and meter r-e-n-d-i-n-g rhyme
until all rhythm stops and meaning dies
“Stop living in the past! Be happy now! 😁”
well, I did try. transfinite years draaaagggggged by
with published Books and Papers duly plowed
and children raised through my charades————> all lies
fanatic’s-frantic-flight-frenetic-flung!!!
in desperation (madness to avoid)
AcCoMpLiShMeNt. AnD pUrPoSe. ever spun
bled dry of joy or meaning in our void
i THRASH behind for stars that i might seize
from bursting harvest moons aglow with you 🎉🎉🎉
(🖕¿so what if it’s neuronal fantasies?🖕):
we’re ANIMATED DUST dumb gods MISCUED
[it’s cold in space] ★ ★ ★ ★★★ our “loving” was for naught
i’m frozen[…………………]empty.
stripped by wrongs we wrought.
This poem seeks to convey the frequent nadir of emotional states in which the poet was often trapped. It compares his being, his emotions, to the atoms in the universe that eventually (in certain cosmological models) will reach a point of zero energy, the temperature of “absolute zero” (Kelvin scale). This concept is tied to the idea of entropy, often discussed as “disorder” but perhaps better understand as “the occupation of all possible states.” Practically it is a measure of a system’s ability to do work, to have an impact on its surroundings.
The poet often feels symbolically that he is sliding to a state of absolute zero, one where nothing can happen and all meaning is lost. He counters (like in the coming sonnet Apologia) the voices of “common sense” in society. They encourage him to “move on” (Apologia) and “be happy now, forget the past.” He responds by noting that he spent years trying and failing, to the point where his long efforts transformed into an acting job, where his “normal” external person of career and family, the former where he worked himself to death in “fanatic’s-frantic-flight-frenetic-flung!!!” to avoid “madness,” all were charades and lies. Internally he was ever “bled dry of joy or meaning in our void.”
The poem ends with the sense of creeping cold, the void of space, where he is frozen and empty (harping back somewhat to A Grand Unification Theory). And the final blow to his sense of vitality and meaning is the realization that he and the beloved did this to themselves.