Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday.

 

On the Uncertain Certain: Negotiating Deepfakes and Shallow Discourse

in the Counterpoise of the Unthought

 

At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.

― Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

 

“Knowledge is simply justified true belief  ― Plato

 

Certainty is impossible ― AristotleCertain, from certus; settled, sure, determined, fixed, reliable, yet also from cenere: to distinguish, decide; sift, sort, separate – what’s certain is never certain, but a paradoxical complex of contradiction, juxtaposition, revision, inversion, elision, derision, all relational elational, delusional, contextual – in the sky stretched ink of the storm.

 

And in the hour of our calling –

 

through crawling scars, vexed

lex / blue checks of the unchecked checkered flex

wrenched reigns, ripped slips

sprawled spins, spun signs

of mourning’s horror –

 

what is for sure

 

in the un-shored s’leurre of

bonjours embouchure

 

in the measured erasures

of viscous kissed / gashed stutters’ slit mist

scattered sweat clutched spasms of scalding ardor’s

holler / though the unfixed re-mix

de-solute absolutes insolent

oscillates’ saucy postulates

 

what is certain —

 

through the terse curtains

of skirted swerves of succor, coursed chorus

sun-lipped slopes / strokes / of tongue-angled

 

anguish / of pulsing traps

rasps, grasps pacts, scraps of recast

fractures, shatters, battered-gagged agon

 

who can be sure of anything

 

in the uncertain machinery

of re-salient aliases / asserted insertions,

ascertained / stained / tainted

 

in the spurred swerves of data scatted chat

gPTSD / in the apparati / of instrumentation

v’errification / fluctuations

of power / relations

 

as i taste you through these caesural shrouds; traumas and atrocities; certain curves, arcs, secrets; risks, wagers, ruses, routes, wrests, wisps; in the angles of entangled contractions, distractions, reactions in the urgent resurgence of whose artificial / interstitial, singed swings, cedes, sifts, ceives, savors / flavors flutters falters alters bracken sucked calls culls; bodies terrors, eros, assertin’ a certain je ne sais quois  —

 

And through slippery formations, emanations,

disinformation / in the ink-drenched darkness

of reclusive occlusion, delusion

 

What is certain  —

 

in the unstrung tinged

spirals of whipped scripts / slick crypts

of averred vers, ravenous, cavernous

reverberant aberrant brutality ripped through

external verities’ dexterity

deflections, confliction, affliction

 

sick with pumped-up parsed portals

pallets of latticed swallowed sweat ripped

licks all cyclically exilic and

stacked with facts —

 

oh what is certain

                                                                                                    when what’s fake

                                                                                        from ‘facio, facere, feci, factum

 

facing the defaced tenets

of re-assorted sordid absorption submersion diversions revisions,

diversions / admissions / submissions

emended all numinous, luminous, voluminous

 

through

              webs

                            of

                                       belief

 

And all sured up –

as i hug the sure  / between the off sure

lee shore s[ee] shore, tabled terraced thrust against

lying unshored and washed / upon —

 

between the oh sure; yeah sure; yahar-ish

issuers of swishy fissures

nothing’s for certain

 

but sho’ enough,

to be sure, rest assured, ‘n though i can’t say for [ ]

i’m pretty damn sure, sure as shootin’, sure as hell

 

through pleasures’ treasures,

seizures, censures

shattered shorn shards

 

what’s sure’s never sure,

but a récherched charade; a shared

shelter of ruched cherishes

 

                                                                                                         between the definite indefinite

                                                                                             probable, improbable pliable, palimpsested,

                                                                                                                polymorphic posits    —

 

Believe, you me, you can bet your boots, your bottom dolor

with certainty, certainly! what’s certain’s uncertain

as the candy-mint Certs^© asserts,

 

                                                                                                        “Certs: two, two, two [minced] in one!”

 

                                                                                                                                   For sure.

 

Adeena Karasick, Ph.D, is a New York based Canadian poet, performer, filmmaker, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of 14 books of poetry and poetics. Karasick teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute, is Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology, Associate International Editor of New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication, 2021 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient and winner of the Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking, and has just been appointed Poet Laureate of the Institute of General Semantics. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx