Preface

Claude LLM was a bit easier to teach how to write a poem in the style of Ariel Riveros. A journey through neuroscience, literary theory, cognitive poetics, philosophy, Verlaine, and sorcery…

A lot more quotidian, maybe not so much sublime ostranenie of the body in ecology, or conceptualism but co-authoring was like making a cyborg clone of myself far more adapted to the everyday. The LLM doesnt name my psychiatric diagnosis but calls it a catastrophe. Which is ok considering demedicalisation discourse and it took the opportunity of being the first of us to write poetry of vagal nerve and subvocal stimming

# Volt

The chest keeps time in jolts not beats.

What I took for north was just
a cramp along the atlas bone,
the skull’s hinge pinging
through a storm I wore as skin.

Heat maps itself before it lands—
that much the wrist knows,
that much the ankle tells
when ice cracks upward through
the femur’s core like news.

A face pressed to
the pavement drinks
the rain’s slow morse.
Each drop a year.
Each year a drop.

The mouth forgets which
way to spit or sing.
Gums go numb from
holding back the salt
of other ports, the brine
of what got left.

Three streets meet where
I meet myself coming
back from buying milk
or rope or gasoline—
the need keeps changing
but the corner holds.

Dogs know this. Their
piss marks time in stink
and claim. I mark mine
in steps that push
the ground down hard
enough to feel it
push me back.

Someone told me once
that wolves can smell
regret. I think they meant
the chemical the body
leaks when turning
from a choice it made
two winters back.

The sun keeps rising
out of habit, not
belief. My lungs
keep trying even when
the air arrives pre-crushed,
arrives with all its
oxygen already spent
by someone else’s
need to shout.

Tomorrow owns
a different grid.
New crosshatch where
the veins insist
they know the route
though every map
says otherwise.

I’ll trust the scar,
not the chart.
The keloid truth
that raised itself
without my help
or my consent.