brutal, baby
this thing, this life
is pretty brutal
nothing’s certain, you know
nothing that’s totally terrible
and nothing that’s joyful as fuck
nothing…
uncertainty, baby
is the rule
so get your love on drip
get it where you can
wait a while till you can get your little sip
…
I heard there was this scientist
up in Ottawa who tried to teach
an octopus how to read —
he thought he could get it to communicate
like how people do…
well, no surprise, this ’pus went crazy,
(well crazy for an octopus anyway, whatever
that means) and used its newly developed
cognitive ability to bust out of its own tank
and set the lab on fire, nearly killing the scientist
…later on they said it had developed
a sort of telepathy, and the damn doctor
knew about it and said nothing—it was like
a sort of mind control ability
trained into its highly complex
distributed nervous system, all
based on reinforcement and scheduled operant
conditioning, you know, like stimulus-response
B.F. Skinner-type shit, except like
way more powerful—anyway, this is how
it figured out how to get the lab’s
artificial intelligence system to activate
the Bunsen burners and blow the whole
shit up…
yeah, I know
brutal, baby
life is brutal
even the cephalopods
want to set it all aflame
Garbage Notes:
This poem is a little strange—it’s basically a rumination on the uncertainty of life punctuated by an absurd science fiction premise.
Often when I’m free writing I’ll pull in references from a variety of media that I’m consuming at any given time. Whether it’s books, magazines, records, tv shows—you name it. It’s like cooking. Whatever ingredients you have on hand, you throw them in and see what happens.
What must have happened here is I started a poem on how brutal and unpredictable life could be (you know, standard Franco Amati fare), and then I began reading this really retro science fiction story published in a very old issue of Galaxy Magazine.
See, a while back I bought a stack of old back issues of random speculative fiction mags that are no longer in print. I sift through them from time to time. Sometimes for ideas. Sometimes to get a feel for how far we’ve come as genre writers.
Anyway, it would take me forever to dig up the actual issue among my stacks of books and other useless shit. I’ll add an addendum later with the actual reference. But suffice it to say, I do remember this was a very pulpy story about a maniacal developmental psychologist who was trying to increase the intelligence of babies.
And what ended up happening was one of the babies somehow became more than just intelligent—they gained some sort of telepathic-telekinesis or something. And then they began destroying the lab and getting revenge on the wicked scientist.
So in this poem baby got substituted with octopus (because they’re way cuter, right?). What follows is the question of what would happen if you’re trying to expand the cognition of an already fairly intelligent animal.
Octopi are already pretty smart. We just underestimate their intelligence because they look so different than us. And they live underwater, which necessitates a very different sort of cleverness than what we might express.
Anyway, in my brutally twisted version, the Octopus goes all Stranger Things on papa scientist and chaos ensues within what would otherwise be a fairly standard Garbage Notes poem on the precariousness of life.
We never know what’s going to happen when we try something. Whether we’re intentionally mucking around in places we shouldn’t or whether we’re playing it safe, going about our daily lives.
You’re never immune to chaos. But if you’re good, you might just have a decent shot at writing about it.
Franco Amati 2024
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*searches Ottawa news archives for stories of an octopus causing an infamous laboratory fire*
I don't even know how to comment sometimes because I read this with my fist in the air saying yes yes yes! This was the exact poetry my brain needed today.