I am thinking that the poem can flick between first and second person, with the ‘I’ being the individual self and the ‘you’ being a global self made up of all the mechanisms of control, an entity that capitalises on all that lives, a machine that only functions based on taking advantage of each self.

A garbled message of programmes that don’t compute,

an operating system designed to swallow itself whole and keep feeding

forcing tail into throat and end to start

until nothing remains but a bloody maw outstretched

overextended

and still unsatisfied

Command-prompted subsistence for another unknown data entry to remain in the table

So what’s the point then?

Live and breathe and perish and be reignited

cup a hand around the flame to keep it burning as long as you can

without fearing the snuff,

the inevitable return to the ground you sprung from,

that you now lay beneath

feeding the next turn of the wheel

___

(Joins into initial rough idea – edited)

And who am I, then?

Another mouth to feed,

clawing for knowledge,

Chewing glass and dirt to make sense of the space you take up

Inhaling greedily all in your path for some tactile feedback of a void world

____

A new lesson learnt for every wound inside my mouth

A reminder that the scrapes and scratches are part of the machine

I can steer the spin

You just spin

An aimless curve circling its own insecurity

My condition knows better

But my conditioning makes me blind

I like how this poem is shaping up, it might be a good time for me to record it and experiment with how this might sound. I am planning to effect the voice to make it as ambiguous as possible – part human, part unconscious machine.

The narrative is largely focused on the idea of a system that swallows itself, in turn transferring sensory inputs into the mass population that create their own feedback loops in each person – fear, doubt, the question of ‘who am I?’ I do want to make the point that our society, when looked at as its own self, is insecure and therefore relies on insecurity to function, constantly going in a spiral. I feel it is important to communicate the opportunistic and oppressive nature of capitalist society, but also ground the poem to revolve around the relationship with the self and the importance of fostering this relationship.

From this point, I am intending to get my friend Ruvi to help me carry on writing the poem, as he is a very talented literature student and I think I need a collaborator to help keep the poem concise and pull out as much imagery as possible from the words used. It is more a question of concise writing, as with the research, knowledge and reference points that I have obtained (I will include more research in the next couple of blog posts that I haven’t recorded yet), there is the danger of overwriting. And with this being presented as a sound piece, the idea needs to come across succinctly and in a way that can be understood by most people – I don’t want to alienate people due to the wording being too vague or academic.