On Consciousness: Three Poems
I’ve been trying out writing poetry lately as another medium for working through ideas. To learn the craft, I've been using AI as a kind of sparring partner—a tool to help me explore structure and phrasing. It’s a back-and-forth process where I provide the core concepts, the direction, and the voice. The final works are born from my own thoughts and hard work, but they are shaped and refined through this new kind of collaboration.
Looking back at a few of these pieces, even though I wrote them months apart from each other, I realized they seemed to be unintentionally connected. Or maybe, it just proves I'm a little obsessed with the theme of consciousness.
Either way, they feel like a kind of triptych. "Tenant" looks at the self in total isolation, "The Seed" explores the self as it is defined by another, and "The Witness" zooms out to view consciousness on a cosmic scale. I wanted to share them here as a different kind of 'work in progress.'
Tenant
I am a tenant in this bone
a consciousness that lives alone
I feel the architecture's weight
but cannot see beyond the gate
A formless thought in fields of night
a candle that can't see its light.
The Seed
The self is but a waiting seed,
aware of want, but not of need.
A sun-bleached stone, a vein of ore,
that knows not what it's waiting for.
It holds a forest in its shell, a silent, solitary hell,
for sun without the soil is death, a held and never-given breath.
But you arrive, a sudden rain,
a furrow cut to soothe the pain.
You are the earth, the world, the grit,
the soil where my own roots can knit.
And in the press of who you are,
I learn the path to my own star.
For what am I, but root and stem,
defined against a stranger's hem?
My lonely growth finds purchase when I learn my shape by knowing them.
The Witness
A silent art in floods of gas and fire,
a masterpiece without a built-in choir.
The spinning suns, a stage without a gaze,
that slept within their own incandescent maze.
Then on a sphere of rock and patient sea,
a nerve evolved, a way for it to be.
Some dust awoke to question and to name,
and light became more than a simple flame.
And in our eyes, the void began to know
the lonely beauty of its long-ago.
For we are but the mind through which it learns,
the consciousness for which the whole thing burns.
But what if this one nerve should fray and cease?
And grant the sleeping dark its old release?
If all the eyes that hold this fragile gaze
Should close upon the end of all their days?
The stars would burn, but stripped of awe and dread,
Their beauty unremembered by the dead.
The silent art would hang in halls of stone,
A masterpiece, forever left alone.
The light would be a simple flame once more,
The math would run, with nothing to explore.
And nothing in the void would be there to regret
The moment that the universe would forget.
