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The Creative Obrst

Poetry, Criticism and Commentary by Leo Obrst

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My Ilk

December 14, 2018 by Leo Obrst

Credit: Ruth Hartnup (Flickr)

I am ilk, an s removed from silk,
a bitter pill for my stalwart fellows,
Leviathan who’s left Eden for a pillow,
a smile on my forehead like the clove
foot of a fleet beast evading bliss
which had been its tendered firmament,
a sibilant shush to quiet dying turbulence.

My savior flies through the skylight
As I pray splayed on the floor below,
arms outstretched for the warmth
they seek, find little of, since I fell to earth
billennia before yellow, green, and blue,
my color only red, red, red, black red.
Lift me through the glass to incandescence.

How would you have found my face, if you
hadn’t seen its light? Triangular
signification was seared into your sight,
as I sought to seem isosceles, not pyramidal,
since I had limited bricks to bulk me out,
but the hypotenuse obscured my image:
Illuminate the right declination.

Since the only holy now is metaphor,
the concrete beast creeps to suburban
Jerusalem on cat feet, nimble nubs,
claws too abstract to bloody up much,
excruciations wilting, hidden behind
the obscure de rigueur mortis of simple
city streets, their dead cell agriculae.

Trotsky got killed with an ice pick. You
weren’t killed, but the image sticks there,
an occipital jab that blinds like curettage
during a lobotomy. You will no longer
need to counteract rationality with feeling,
given the disconnect. Your science can
grow as if stalks were planted in liquids.

I stuff celery on Thanksgiving with cream
cheese. When you eat it, eat olives with it.
Remember the sensation, prepare it again
for Christmas. Somehow add hot pepper
to it, as if flesh were added to soul
constantly, accrued around it, as if you
fought for justice even if they killed you.

Filed Under: poetry Tagged With: Creatives

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Dr. Leo Obrst is retired, was formerly Chief Scientist, Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence at MITRE (www.mitre.org), where he created and led the Information Semantics Group (semantics, ontological engineering, knowledge representation and management), and has been involved in projects on Semantic Web rule/ontology interaction, context-based semantic interoperability, ontology-based knowledge management, conceptual search and information retrieval, metadata and taxonomy/thesaurus construction for community knowledge sharing, intelligent agent technology, semantic support for natural language processing, and ontology-based modeling of complex decision-making. He is also currently involved in many US federal government efforts to establish Communities of Interest (COI) vocabularies and ontoloiges for information sharing, including the development of universal and common models which span those COIs. In 1999-2001, he was director of ontological engineering at VerticalNet.com, a department he formed to create ontologies in the product and service space to support Business-to-Business e-commerce. Leo's PhD is in theoretical linguistics with a concentration in formal semantics from the University of Texas-Austin. He has worked over 30 years in computational linguistics, knowledge representation, and in the past 18 years in ontological engineering and more recently in Semantic Web technologies. Leo has also been employed by Boeing, Software Development Group (a partner), Intelligent Business Systems, the Microelectronics Computer Corporation (MCC), Texas Instruments, SoftCraft, and Ohio Edison. Read More…

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