The feedback cycle feedback cycle by Ken Belford

At times it’s hard to tell the difference

between a word and a decision.

Understanding’s accumulate.

There are bindings between words,

a kind of retrieval of memory traces.

First I saw distant lightning,

then heard what I thought was thunder,

then trees coming down, a chain reaction.

New meanings fold into the interchange.

Word or part word, poetry isn’t always

an act of understanding. Consciousness

is an episodic series of moments but narrative isn’t

necessarily consciousness. Fix saw, cut pole,

sometimes there’s a darkness in the brain.

There’s something beyond what can be grasped

even in poetry, beyond the list of words

that do not appear. Subjects discriminate,

and there’s an infinite variety of forms

in the background feedback cycle of cues.