Caveat: Quatrains #66-71

(Poem #262 on new numbering scheme)

"Philosophical zombie" is
a concept you may know.
I'd like to now propose a twist
to how those stories go.
Most typically these zombies are
like strange automata.
They act like people, react too -
but it is just data.
So nothing's felt and nothing's hoped;
there is no inner spark.
These zombies might seem like humans,
but their sad minds are dark.
Now here's the change I'd like to make:
let's add a soul inside,
but not connected to the flesh -
it will only reside.
Like those sad paralytics who
stare helpless and afraid,
this second mind lacks any link,
must wait for any aid.
So here's the first, with agency,
the second with the why,
together they must walk the earth,
as we do, you and I.

– six quatrains in ballad meter – an essay on phenomenology in six stanzas.

Caveat: Quatrain #64

(Poem #260 on new numbering scheme)

Con chupe de pescado, pues,
soñaba sin querer.
Al despertar, me estremecí
¿cómo pude saber?

This is my second attempt at a quatrain using English ballad meter, but in Spanish – for which ballad meter is quite awkward. Still, this more or less works, except how it reverts to trochees in the last line. Don’t ask me what it means, exactly. A prose paraphrase: about fish chowder, then, [I] dreamed without wanting to. Upon waking up, I shivered – how could I know?
This is actually a dream I woke up from this morning: nothing complicated or surreal – I was just eating Peruvian style chupe de pescado at a certain Peruvian restaurant in Newport Beach, down the road from where I used to work in 2005-2006. I used to go there for lunch with coworkers fairly often. That fish soup is some of the most memorable food in my life, for some reason. I’m sure if I had it now, it would seem a poor shadow of its former glory – but that would be because of the changes to my own physiology of taste, post cancer.

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