seventeen

 so i have to head out of paso fino. back to the barking horse. en la calle, donde amigos, gitana.

paso fino was an expensive respite from wondering where to go next. the house i built is off limits to me even as my mother becomes ever frail in the apartment upstairs. i feel lonely for her, like i want to make her tea and let her ramble, let her yell at me whatever abuse is left in her, it's not hers anymore, her wound is in her granddaughters, and childless me. 

i ache to hear her breathing, to know her fluttering heart has strong years of blood pumping yet. 

the biological body of an aquarian born just a few years before hiroshima and nagasaki, on the pacific, in hollywood. a body of working bone and great posture, rabbit teeth. i miss her already, i've missed her all these moons, i miss that she loved to put on make up to go to work at a job she was proud of and well esteemed. librarians are an exclusive league of actors, life can be scripted and told to utter student devotion. story telling is how civilizations evolved and collapsed. 

who needs virgil, homer or shakespeare, it's the future, librarians had harry potter and the kids loved to read. i've visited her in death at the beginning and forever more, i sit at her desk under prepared. the grade i made is always dismissive of the overtime or the record time put in. she only read my hot garbage once, it made her cry, like it was her fault i could scribble careful erotica. all of hollywood in a flash of unearthly origin, across the pacific vastness, gold on silicon, shone the babies scorched in honeypot mind games. a hyper competitive adultery. didn't say she saw it, just said she was there. 

let's say all the theories are true, and the pfizer vaccine turns you into a patented form of nonhuman, a genetic chimera, a trans, aquarian mom was the first to get hers to travel on an airplane between lockdowns to see the daughter who's never written a full essay to save her life, is that person no longer my mother? and is that why she only communicates to illicit the devoted response, her student captors, their estimation for her. who is this person then that can sell the property upon which i've built my house? 

"i loved covid" she said, remarking how nice it was to not see anybody. it was a signal to me that she prefers the solitude of her own company to the perplexed questioning of mine. so i can back off and let her be as she goes through the stages of bad posture and brittle bones. i've seen all the scenarios in the future, i've already gone through the staggering summits of grief and bereavement. i sat in the backseat while she napped in the front.  

dear prudence

the thing about writing and this new information technology gimmick the geeks are calling artificial intelligence is that the reader cannot be fooled. that's why i could write about anyone and it could be about everyone else. the computer can't understand dick. intelligence is not for machinery, biomimicry, genome modeling, future building. 

the reader can't be duped. yes the words are bold and persuasive. but every reader will go to sleep and dream the lie into logic in order to wake up to the far more serious matter of loving. the binary of like/no-like and all the psychedelic infantilization of human art it attempts to create, it's unicorn worlds of avatar, the pathos of deception can never imprint the smell of warm bread, cold window and death approaching as much as the written word can in the eyes of the reader.

i could write about everyone and it could be about just one person, the computer can't understand who is real and what is robot. yet, that one person by virtue of real time space, genetic code, common places, shared experience of thrills and deceptions with the ancestors that live through their eyes, knows it's him or her that i'm alluding to. and yes, i'll end my sentences in prepositions, grammar nazis. 

before a child learns to read, they already know everything. they know they are from God. they know they will grow up to be a mom or a dad, they suspect the world is stupid but they know that fixing it should be easy, and they struggle with the language that tries to persuade them otherwise until they start to read. 

reading comprehension and mastery of writing confirms between peers that you know that i know. in essence every human alive is accomplice to every other human alive. because we've mastered language and discourse to include individuation. cyborgs cannot individuate, they are inventions of our imagination connected by literature, not code and reverse engineering.

if individuated humans were machines, a study of their natal chart, the astronomy of where the planets, the moon and the sun were, when they were born on this planet, will indicate with great precision and clarity what kind of chaos and purpose each unique human brings to our shared experience. and the binary of sex is the only difference, the sacred difference that makes for more readers. 

but machines have no mother. and i claim no paternity with the phone you read this from.  i just live here.