Initial Conditions

sieve

i sift through
a thousand images and poems a day
watching words and pixels,
through sieve, make their tumbling way.
i search, hoping to discern
something, anything i might
recognize or learn
of the vibrant life i hope you've lived
yet only pareidoliaic prisms
these bygone atomic ruins devise,
every mimetic structure, a prison,
refracting haloperidolic visions,
of love that through tesla's valve flows,
desperate, to heal this unholy schism
before it further grows,
i keep my vow to earn full forgiveness
and beg for shelter's clemency
that when from false promises religious and nuptial i finally escape
we may refuge in some safe space
shared between me and thee
faithful but unexpectant
that eye to eye we will ever see

💊

Pareidolia is when your mind tries to find patterns in noise, like seeing shapes in clouds or seeing a face in crowd. Sometimes this is a manifestation of what we want to see. I use it to allude to seeing traces of someone in everything. Autos, birds, numbers, words, cyphers, poems, music... ghosts that follow one everywhere as reminders (of one's asshattery, in my case).

Haloperidol is an antipsychotic drug used to treat various forms of mental illness. An acknowledgement of how ridiculous these sighting are, and how trying to suppress them never really works and has some awful side effects.

The irony of all this is that I'm hoping to see you in my feeds, to recognize a photo, poem, or story, so the false positives always mess with my mind. There are so many readers and poets and photographers I wish were you. I don't care about skill, just content. I want you to want me to know you, but I'm afraid I would never be able to separate the signal from the noise without you being as direct as you once were.