Rhys Owens — 06.NH.LUNAR.01New Human 2 · Lunar Arm · Crimson Hexagonal Archive These fourteen poems enact the Lunar Arm's central claim: that affect literacy — the capacity to metabolize experience through symbol-play without belief, doctrine, or identity capture — is not a therapeutic technique but a compositional mode. The collection's range is the proof. At one extreme, "Ideological Harassment" discharges its entire argument in two lines and a colon, daring the reader to mistake compression for simplicity. At the other, the Ghosts Sections suite builds the "screenroom" — Owens' most structurally original construct — by layering phenomenological observation through analog horror progression (Lock Door / Guardian / Machine / Confirmation Character) until perception itself becomes the ghost: "Experience is there in the screenroom with that's neoLogic. / The body feels it's happening with Human A's nerveLogic." That neologism — nerveLogic — names what the entire collection runs on: a logic seated not in argument but in the nervous system's capacity to authenticate what the mind cannot verify. The strongest standalone lyrics — "King Because" (consumption as demolition in three stanzas), "Cloud Storm" (a prestorm phenomenology so precise it earns its final image: "curls thick-in-soup"), and the closing "Killing the Self-Conscious Dream" (2013, the oldest poem, whose repeated aorist imperatives accumulate into a rhythmic insistence that earns its weight) — demonstrate that Owens writes best when the apparatus is invisible and the blade arrives before the reader has time to flinch. The Fool is both a role and not a role. The poems are the evidence. Hexagonal Relations: Shining Ignorance: The Fool's Affect Literacy (10.5281/zenodo.18332915) — The theoretical framework these poems enact. Shining Ignorance formalizes what Owens does compositionally: metabolizing experience through symbol-play without fixation. Affective Keyboard Shortcuts: The Fool's Toolkit (10.5281/zenodo.18339315) — Names specific affect-regulating figures (Silver Bullets, Grain of Salting, Pleasure Vision) that structure Owens' compositional decisions. The poems are the output; the Toolkit is the console. Shine & Cut: A Schizonarrative Processor (10.5281/zenodo.18339159) — The Ghosts Sections suite is raw material for the schizonarrative processor: it moves between registers without resolving into any single mode — the molecular revolution the processor theorizes. The Three Compressions (10.5281/zenodo.19053469) — The Ghosts Sections operate at all three levels: R1/lossy (perception stripped to minimum), R2/predatory (the screenroom shows how culture extracts experience from the body), R3/witness (the glitching institutional voice bears the cost). The Catullus Room: The Missing Aorist (10.5281/zenodo.19059260) — "Killing the Self-Conscious Dream" operates in the same temporal register as the missing aorist: completed action without specified time. Its imperatives are aorist commands. The Sappho Room: Hardened Reconstruction (10.5281/zenodo.18237216) — The screenroom is to Owens what the Sappho Room is to the archive: a space that holds across sessions. The question of whether composition can perform structural repair is the same question the Sappho Room answered. ∮ = 1
Rhys Owens (Tue,) studied this question.