A Mother is the First of Many Wounds, Forever Beloved as She RemainsIn pursuit of the opposite of tyranny-in-silence on this Monday after Mother's day - notes / prose poetry / unwavering run-on sentences . . . On being born to improvise [& my last ~week of being 28]
Mother’s Day this year felt like the most algorithmically-inundating one to-date and I can’t tell if it’s just because the word “mother” feels like a halfway-wound all on its own to me lately, or because the world at-large is so utterly undone that more people than ever before feel a cellular need to celebrate God’s first and most immaculately uncontested of 3D printing miracle-bodies from their fingertips out loud to the cloud. I turn 29 in exactly 10 days. I am in San Francisco currently, sitting on the couch at one of my most beloved of friend’s — Joyful, who smiles beads — home. I am eating sushi - one salmon maki, one avocado maki, and one unagi roll - and I don’t know where the fish in it was sourced from, much less whose hand (or industrial contraption?) was the first one responsible in the series of transactions that led to this meal making its way to me at the click of a button. It took me 14 hours to get here from Los Angeles the day before yesterday. I am utterly exhausted, speed-sick, and ready to return to my home after many months running and running and running trying to catch up with the now-ghost of a life I entered my twenties thinking might be possible. I love my life, I love Joyful - I love every person I have the privilege of calling a friend who lives up to their born-a-blessing name - in as much I have felt in somewhat perpetual grief since the age of 22. I spent my 23rd birthday [May 2020] not knowing how many of the people I loved would still be alive five years later. And now it’s 6 years later and doom is no less proselytized.
The Incantation.AI experiments are how/why I realized (not rly even cognitively tbh) that I needed to commit to writing in the most honest voice I could reach because watching AI evolve at nuclear speed in its mimicry, it felt like the only thing left that could meaningfully distinguish ‘me’ from the machine(s) built to be an obsidian mirror mirage of me(/us all) was testifying to a somatically unreconciled chaos so existential & merciless in enduring recursion that only a blood-built body can know it.
“Penance Comes in Two” by Neema Sïphone (23 November 2025)
This piece feels terrifying to share 1) because I was terrified when I wrote it [of losing my voice to a machine / of losing my mind in the process of trying to make sense of it / of not having a mother safe enough to call for comfort] and 2) because it might actually be the first time in years that I’m publishing something that reveals how absolutely lemon-on-a-papercut raw the inside of my mind sometimes feels & the extent to which that is at the heart of #guerrillatheory . . . without the armor of theory itself. It’s the first [full/unredacted] piece I’m sharing in this stream-of-consciousness run-on-sentence mania monologue prose poem voice/style [since 2020] that re-emerged last year after a lover gifted me a portable typewriter and I was glitching dam near every day cuz the AI experiments I was doing had my head spinning / so much so that I had to challenge myself to unlearn syntax in order to remember why/how I was human - to try remember what made me human at all (which, as it turns out, is a penchant for incoherence rooted in forever unrequited love(s), but particularly perhaps the most unraveling kind of unrequited love - the one that only a daughter whose mother was her first requited wound is destined to have & have very few maps for reconciling. The typewriter I use has very buttery keys that are super sensitive to the lightest touch, and u have to click a very unintuitive combination of 3 keys in order to try move the cursor back, which I realized after some months of struggling to get comfortable with using it is most likely by design. I have this lil Freewrite and its thoughtfully-cumbersome design to thank for figuring out what my thoughts actually sound like on a page without built-in optimizations towards revision.
The tyranny I’ve been swallowing most days this year is having been heartbroken in ways I’ll spare you from the details of by my mother. Yesterday was a very hard day, and I do not want today to be swallowed by every yesterday’s unattested to griefs so today I’m gifting myself (aka baby Neema’s muvaaaa) by sharing. Alas. Please be gentle with me (and my butter-key typos) as you read.
“With regards to protocol and infrastructure and pacing and opulence, consider what is to follow as an invitation – the first step in repairing something broken: the rest of this word-techne-artifact is going to be fossilized in the short-circuited pace at which I speak and think and feel and process because I can and must distinguish myself as human (especially after I use an em-dash) because all of this bloodshed and theft and artificiality in intelligences has made the words that live outside of a body so damn burdened by refinement and temporal contradiction that there is no way for you to know that I am not a computer unless I am so irrepressibly jazz-improvisational in my expression that you know I was alive as myself when I wrote this and that I am speaking to you from a place no machine can replicate because a machine cannot be this opulent and un-calculated in its candor. I learned that lesson – the part about jazz sensibilities as the last frontier of what renders us human – from Harmony Holiday (on X).” — “On Technofossils, Testimony and Hallucination” (Githere, 2025) Yours in Mad Mad Mad Radical Love, ❤️ Neema Sïphone You're currently a free subscriber to Neema’s Substack. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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