METEMPSYCHOSIS

by Max Lucy

June 8, 2025

This collection of poems is an exegetic attempt at processing a mental breakdown. Through the writings of Thomas Moynihan, JG Ballard, and William Burroughs, as well as the accelerationist project known as the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit), I experienced an almost complete derealization. What I found generative in this breakdown was a simultaneous belief and disbelief; time was a non-existent, reality was fickle, and yet neither had been completely shattered or dispelled. I firmly believed that everything around me was an illusion, and yet clung to the rational notion that it was my experience, not the world, that was illusory. At a complete failure to properly represent in prose this experience, the illusion of the illusion, the simultaneous unreality of the real and reality of the unreal, the space between a neurotic attempt at maintaining psychical homeostasis and complete psychotic rupture, I turned to poetry. There are no particular events worth pointing to, not even the breakdown itself, as represented cleanly. This collection is a collage, fragments and scraps exploring the logic of the breakdown as applied to subjective experience and memory.

“A person still half in league with the dream world betrays it in his words and must incur its revenge.”

-Walter Benjamin

“True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.”

-Theodor Adorno

1. Metempsychosis

The flower barked at it, 

surging like explosions of amphetamines 

against a dour vessel 

and something hate or fuck-filling. 

There was something in the air, 

Christ-like 

coming down 

to her tiny wounds. 

And a voice like hands 

rang out 

clashing and kaleidoscopic 

to greet the sailor. 

“I’m sorry,” 

wailed the bosun 

and in that months-long moment 

waves of innocence usurped a boat. 

There was a flash 

like injections of 

dye into a prepared slide 

and the microscope was object. 

Monsoons swirled inside 

assault victims— 

those with heart deficiencies— 

and millions of s/o/u/ns collapsed. 

Water poured 

up from her 

and into clamped ears 

but for both to no avail. 

What is a drowned ship 

that meek 

has begged to float? 

Nothing, she says 

and all there is 

to go off of 

is the pounding 

of her soft silence 

fathers and child 

soldiers marching along 

with teary smiles 

and firm hands. 

The water 

which had always been drowned 

felt a love 

that the boat could not withhold.

2. Limpet mine

something about 

insoluble dreams or 

schizoid STOP. corner fears. 

all’s well that well’s left was. collaged— 

the last detonation 

over six months ago. 

and ate away or 

is STOP. 

like an axe in stump 

or viscera. 

promised was supposed 

to STOP. and done after 

lasting irrupture 

or got rebroked 

or pleading.

3. Splinters in the eye

CERTAIN MEDICAL INTRUSIONS GILDED AND HARD IS WHEN I GOT GADFLIES BUZZ A DEAD PERSON HANGED ON REALITY PRINCIPLE OVER SIX INSOLUBLE EXPLOSIONS OF METAPHYSICS AMPHETAMINES IS VISCERA. 

AXE NERVE CLUSTERS AS A KIND OF COMFORT TORE A HOLE IN FRINGE UNIVERSAL ORGANELLES AS CIRCUITOUS BLEEDING. 

GNAWING SORRY KEEPING SCALES DESTINED TO STOP GOETHE OPENED US TO COMPLETE SPIRITUAL PLANTIGRADE CHRIST PORN BUT LAY LOCKED COULDN’T BE.

4. Findings

1. We have studied postural positioning at ungeometric angles; 

hachures on a roadmap to final crises 

that Goethe found to reside in the spine— 

the skull and pelvis 

respectively. 

2. Confusing sap stuck to God’s great pubic mound 

arranging the nonsensuous head of bio-inductive derangement— 

the dissolute organism hanged on the 

tenuous intestinal tracts of being, no, 

the reality principle, 

3. and so it is not wrong to at last state: 

napalm is effluvia and 

there is no nucleus more destined to fallout— 

complete spiritual suicide— than the plantigrade biped.

5. Sonnet

when I got 

your 

buzz I 

didn’t 

I didn’t 

like 

hearing 

from a dead person, I 

I had 

I said 

sorry three 

times and 

couldn’t be.

6. Wooden crucifix

Grief like gadflies permeating 

 permeating the air 

all miasmic and weighty 

and altogether gnawing 

 gnawing. 

Millenia of metaphysics 

put me here. 

Got us here 

  here. 

But the circuitous questioning pales 

  pales to your prodigal 

wounds on the wall 

and millennia of metaphysics 

have opened 

  opened these 

worrying wounds bleeding 

  bleeding out 

  and out 

into that fleeting fringe 

where grief flies forth—flies out 

  out of awe and arboreta 

as a kind of comfort.

7. Cogitator misfire

t. t. 

tt. 

mmm. 

n n n nneuronal load blownn n n n 

o over. 

the repeating ing ing ing ing s s snaps of the iliac c crest proved d 

breaks ks not given n n n glum suicide lec c ctures, 

all l l l l l l of which c ch brought t t t t t ttttt t twelve ap apostates to outer rr mmmmecca, m m march and m may yy y miles from 

aquinas’ s s connipshit t t. 

that t way y he touched d d d d us 

like h heaven collapsed d d dd ddddd d ing ing under ssssssssssssssso much joy. 

sssss 

ssssssssssssssssssssss 

wasssssssssssssssssssssssssss 

sssssssssss 

t.

8. Photographic poem

There is a wrought iron… 

…totem 

gilded and hard 

that tore a hole in the 

horizon line 

that clouds 

and sea 

could not marry 

but lay locked 

and sapped only 

lees of their promise. 

There are certain medical intrusions… 

…between water and sky 

at the nerve clusters of  

universal organelles— 

balustrades filled and filled— 

barring cell lysis, 

ferrously… 

…no longer illumining 

the promise of any actual break 

but now keeping scales of the schism. 

Can you feel potentiality-for-being 

of Being? 

No. 

We threw rocks into the ocean 

and they sank.

9. Anaphylaxis brochure

8. Exploder out of loop through pricks, caesuras, wounder, snipped away from us in pig bristles—honest, peripheral, fearing the opening violence, systems of hate washing over us. 

19. Arrange periods of numbers to schematize the heaven-evacuation routes through the sublative process; unfold the refuse drive in development seizures, far along the continental shelf of catastrophes in the outgrowth palpitations, death spasms, animal miasma. 

7. Burning circuit breakers—water, quickly! The lack cathexis maintains a unique shape to swim in, out, in, out of the cosmic abandonment neurosis until the rifles crawl through the back of our godheads and flash—Plato was correct about our eyes—the god particle out of place until the crust of the federal operative is installed until its searing lightness rented gently. 

134. Shut the door, please. We can hear God there failing to manumit. Others derail inwards. Odi profanum vulgus et arceo. Sniffing the tidal pools for traces of the transtemporal trauma strata that give rise to each passing form in eigengrau, spatium to container, light to eyelid, brained to death, rock to temple, trail to floor. Epicenter and rhizome said between monism there was the demiurge in hate down the winding vertebral column, the place succumbing breathed.

10. Elimination disorder

glossy green stipules waxed over me into the 

ichor out and onto me in glowing fountain, flowery noose, cerebral and 

hosed down my vernacular pant leg 

i lapped. 

our want was eye lock and 

lock and longer 

until i feel it breaking. 

and yours broke in me and i felt that 

wellspring like blooming 

failures. collapsed 

synapses. 

i felt too many eyes and they 

got in, too, asked 

when the little snotnose snapped, 

where I lived 

and my relations 

and i began to cry. 

it wasn’t in the text but i heard the implicit 

lines and still knew state-correct, paranoid 

prefigurations—auditory hallucination, verbal apocalypses, little gun 

pointed backwards— 

until the warm stream was found to contain 

urine. 

wincing now i taped over the tachometer and 

something between roped around and 

fused to the screen of the latest trickling 

atrocity exhibitions i saw you. like the pricks between 

venereal nerves. i 

asked what you were doing and felt dismal again, knowing the accelerator was now always ending, never 

ended. 

11. Revelation-

-The sun 

 shone 

the lights 

came 

from my 

forehead and 

-threat 

threatened to split 

it I saw 

lights 

in the firm 

-the firmament 

snuffing out. 

After the fall, 

ing dream I saw 

and us made to repent 

the pent 

-the present 

ation; 

of the pavement. 

-And once all of 

my folding hands unfurled 

-sticky, 

judged summary 

exec utive func tion, 

I read the sixth fourth of 

the Torah 

titled: 

relationality and 

-non sense.

12. Unsterilized mysticism

The nine natures of this excursus have thus far been scientific. 

Can you feel the displeasure roll 

off of the tongue, down along the spinous processes? 

The glitzy seeds of the epoch’s end? 

These findings have lifted us from the myelin sheath into the 

Third Event, human organism as God, 

as a series of chrysalis-negatives gleaned in 

-photographs, 

-the extrasensory digits of the Mother, 

-what liars called linearity (temporal crises), 

-the mechanical sliding insincerely spat out as biological function, 

-last Tuesday’s catastrophic “consciousness” situation of which the Board has been made aware. 

Bringing us closer was Maimon’s or Kennedy’s licking observation that the very structure of our emptiness was, after all, so infant.

13. Intercessor cento

I can 

feel my eye breaking 

whenever a happy thing 

falls. 

All that is solid melts 

into air—nothingness 

lies coiled 

in the heart of being— 

like a worm. 

Thirteen—stopping 

at this number I felt 

a cruel 

pleasure.

14. Developing agent

the interfacing of two machines actualizes a third machine. breath is the prefix of spirit. cover your eyes. these machines by interfacing are actualizing a third machine. this machine actualizes a fifth through the interfacing of a fourth or sixth machine derived from a given number of machines, N. stop. morality is a machine actualizing its opposite. reason is a machine actualizing its opposite. sense is a machine actualizing its opposite. the machine actualizes its opposite in unconscious process. breathe stop. N and breath are the flow of machinery to the actualizing spirit stop. a time process breathes actualizing machines stop. the only purpose of this stop  machines interface stop actualize stop. stop. the only purpose of this was to stop. to find stop.  that machines interface to actualize compound machines without needing to ask stop. N actualizes spirit stop.