a word, any word

every silence is a sea
every sound a seed
a word, any word
is a semantic sea of phonetic seeds
consciousness, for example,
is a sea: misty, mystic, mysterious
yet, you see, its semantic unfinity
is quite simply made of four finite seeds:
con, not pro but artifice
she, not he but we
us, not them and now
ness, not ism, just ness

I took the license to modify the exercise a bit, to use phonetic units of my chosen word (which were incidentally 4: con/she/us/ness), and the associated binary (semantic) opposites (pro/he/them/ism) as class-text inputs (8 in all; & I replaced ‘he’ with ‘we’ ;)) rather than the key words or lines of the poem.

The result is that the image is a quasi-binary display-mechanism for syllables of the word upon which the poem was written, and its somewhat-antonym. This way the image allows the word (a semantic unit) to emerge only within the consciousness of the viewer, which seemed a necessary subtlety to work with a word like ‘consciousness’, and avoid being pedantic about it.

Also, I found that in multiple iterations, the phonetic units seemingly construct and dismantle various other, almost plausible words. And this teases me to wonder what ‘them-us-ism’ or ‘we-pro-she-ness’ might even mean. In some senses, I see twin poems here: the written and the generated.