an alternating impulse

If another android
calls you a robot
does it hurt you more,
or is it less?

Hand-Crank Paper

Don't ask me to speak aloud.
There are switches to
Fill in blanks
In cadence
Imprecise and chopped together
From your scraps.

Double time my interpretation into
Auditory stimulation of
Communication centers
Beyond the inherent
Protocol for the duration of
The mechanism.

(music boxes cranked fast
Distort tunes
Throw off gears
And break springs. )

I need no words

I need no words
To fly
To scream or to
Let you know yes
To communicate
Create build love empower.


Words are only involved
Because you would call me
Storyless
Deny my oppression as real
And yeah this is bending
Into it but


You never would learn
Without your own
Supports and adaptations.


Maybe your over dependance
Is your own damn
Limit of "vision."



----

Written in response to "typical" language processing privilege by otherwise awesome community storytellers, Allied Media Conference in Detroit, June 29th, 2012

Echoed at 3 and 24

My niece has been

echoing and copying

everything lately. She copies

words from

upset teens on TV-

"My life, my family no

one cares about my life!"-

when she is

upset and

Bounces across the room

in joy joy joy

with words from

Lilo and Stitch on her lips.

But she's 3, and

so it's normal for her

at that age to echo

echo echo echo

words.

I can't find the words

to say everything and

so I send her, him copied words

of my self

doubt- "Fast as You Can

run free yourself from me"-

and cite, cite, recite the words

from songs

saying I

Love "Something", "I Want

You, you so bad"

bubbling the beatles and

Fiona and Adele and raging

Rise Against As I

"Pulled on these

bootstraps so hard

that they broke." at

24, it's a pathology.

________

Written in Response to Julia's blog post, Metaphors Are Important: An Ethnography Of Robotics, as a comment. The following songs are echo'd in this: Fast As You Can by Fiona Apple; Something and I Want You (She's So Heavy) by the Beatles; Disparity By Design by Rise against. Links are to Youtube videos with the lyrics on screen.

Articulate

It is confusing when you say it-

Articulate.

Every time I hear it, I think

that maybe I do not understand the word

because it is not my experience of

how things rush out.

"1 divided into words or syllables meaningfully arranged"

Attempted.

I struggle to arrange these words

with only a "book" knowing of how they might mean

never knowing truly the meaning it is

arranging itself for you.

"2 Able to Speak" Sometimes or maybe even

Usually.

More often than I say, My thoughts

will not come into words, leaving me silently

wanting, tongue still yet wanting to

articulate out the within.

"3 expressing oneself readily, clearly, or effectively"

Hardly.

The words are sought for bitterly,

struggled with, and always- always- found lacking

in the ability of that first charge of

"expressing oneself"

Often these words are unwilling, jumbled, and ineffective to

Expound

the ideas that drive them;

my voice does not air readily the frustrations

laying between my thoughts and tongue

so you:

Fail to see the desperation of grasping for my words

Oblivious.

Failing to factor in affect

inconsistently portrayed, and routinely unprojected are

an accuracy of the emotion within, displaced

from line of sight.

That you do not hear my struggles does not mean they don't

Exist.

That I fail to emote them does not

end them. Just because you see meaning and effectiveness

does not mean that it is always as my

Intended pattern.

To Inspiration

I

I allow myself to wither
My passions separated out from
the lyrical
The core of thought desiccated
in prose
While I try to ferment these thoughts
unassisted
into words.

From time to time the dam breaks open
and my need for poetry to
translate
out my thoughts, unable to
contain
my scratch work in my head
any longer
to describe.

In this way the disparate parts of me
I segregate the elements that make me
my passion
from my thoughts, and so I dwell in the
facts and figures
moving out my emotions through a
vent hole
in private.

II

There is a time that a story can move
words without sound
dance more powerful without music
ecstatic exhalations of
power, emotion and thought in one
gigantic swoop of expression.

My own words trembled and failed to pass out
the encompassing effects.
But though my speech doesn't move
my thoughts do, my soul does
and, guided forward by the winds of fellows
already moving, I move too.

III

In 1969 (no jokes just now please)
Feminist Theorist Carol Hanisch declared
"The personal is Political"
A response to the idea that when a group
of people suffering under
oppression come together to discuss their
oppression, it is "Just group therapy."

Throughout the ages (maybe longer than we've been homo sapiens sapiens)
art has been a method of non-verbal declaration
Expression of our interior into the exterior world.
To dare to speak the unspeakable,
Expressing in words-
or without them- that which might,
in fullness, not lend itself to language alone.

We are taught (Or is it demanded?)

that our desperation is private, our personal

a secret to be shared in dimly- or fluorescently- lit rooms.

Our pain is somehow ours alone,

to separate experience

from the cause and conditions that

create and foster the framework upon which we are suspended.

Instead, someday (soon?)

can we not take our experience and, raw as art,

push out our collective ill-conceived self-loathing

acknowledging our unified-

and diverse-

experience, as people whose lives

before "without" defined, bloom from within identified out.

Dedicated to the performers of Sins Invalid- who inspire me not only to take my personal into public/political, but to take my experience- my "art"- there as well.

Analogy>Simile>Metaphor and Me

I. Analogy

Experience : is to

Once

I put my hand down

into a vat of wine that was fermenting

and felt the foam that was bubbling

up,

As the glucose broke down into

ethanol, and CO2 bubbled up

Exothermic

past the layer of sludgy

grape rinds.

:: as Emotion : is to

Often,

I read articles

constructed by "professionals", families

supposed allies in my life, that then make

my

Emotions active, rising my blood pressure

and the heat slowly releasing

from my skin

in waves, stomach acids

churning.

II. Simile

My emotions then rise within me

like

CO2 from fermenting glucose;

my skin and thoughts release

as

the exothermic reaction of fermentation;

My physiological markers of distress feel

like

the bubbling yeast felt on my hands.

III. Metaphor

My rage and indignation

ferments as I read the words my

oft called

(by others)

allies have written

about, for, in lieu of me.

I release out my CO2 exhalations

In effort to respond to those who would

speak "for"

(how can they?)

me and mine

the heat, passion, held in frothing.

Bubbling up within me, I try to

translate out this emotion and find my

words lacking

(can words ever?)

to express the

emotion, sensation, feeling of you

and your presumptions of how far I can take this.

____

If you would like more info on what fermentation is/does/means in wine making, try this article at everyday Chemistry.

Poetry and the vision of thought

I pour out these words

to describe the state of being

in my head

before I can make them form

the language that you all are speaking

Hours Days weeks at a time they build up

till over washing into this flood plain

of poetry

before fermenting, bubbling, then

coalescing into words that make sense

or seem to

Until I realize I've misunderstood your language again.