Cold Stars
The cold stars congeal
In the echo of their emanating coronas.
They turn the vacuous distance
Into light—
Not yet absconded by the blackness
Of concealed skies,
Of lackluster wonder.
poem by Tim Stensloff
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Phobos
The opposite of
Love is not hate, nor is it
Indiff'rence. Instead, the
Antithesis is power.
The will to dominate is
Confusion manifested,
And in confusion is fear:
Love's contradiction.
poem by Tim Stensloff
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Formication
The creeping sensation is crawling all across my sick body,
Begging for me to scratch at the omnipresent itch of my skin.
Instead, I will fall asleep—my closing eyelids squashing the bugs.
poem by Tim Stensloff
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Fingers for Nuances
All sense and feeling
Can be disseminated,
Set to a dosage.
Deeper meanings, convictions,
Can be analyzed,
Pathologized for the sake
Of tapping into
A better understanding
Of banal reality.
poem by Tim Stensloff
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Pragmatic Tones
What use is color
In the monochromatic
Fractures we call lives?
We siphon out an array
Of prosaic grays,
And paint a pedestrian
Portrait of the world.
We conceal our existence
Looking for reality.
poem by Tim Stensloff
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Pup Dig
One does not expand
Their own ideology
Through vast, new branches
Of information, but through
The variation
Yielded by experience.
We find our future
By knowing the past enough
To rearrange it. Evolve.
poem by Tim Stensloff
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Singularity
The singularity swirls in on itself,
Tangling time and space in the one,
Confined moment of discord and harmony—
The rapture of restraint,
The chaos of release,
The catharsis of imploding manifests
Of desire.
poem by Tim Stensloff
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The Marionette
The marionette
Dances as it dangles down
From the plastic thread.
The hand commands it to move
With nimble fingers
And long-practiced maneuvers.
The hanging puppet
Sways in the sky, paralyzed
And helpless—playing pretend.
poem by Tim Stensloff
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My Life as Simulacra
Xerox your paintings,
Deposit them in a screen.
Avoid the decay
Of natural processes—
Disintegration.
Preserve your thoughts in this way:
As a copy of
Expression. If that seems cold,
Burn the real paintings for warmth.
poem by Tim Stensloff
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Cliché Empiricism
We no longer notice the forest
or the trees—
to use a cliché—
for we have now chosen
to focus in on
the twigs and branches—
supplanted, tumbled in the dirt—
that have fallen,
crosshatching the steps
ahead.
poem by Tim Stensloff
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