A small ember goes out. Enraged, I watch the clenched snakes uncoil—the retinal fingers retreat—as oil extracts in water—all standing scope, all erect dimension, searched again with clarity – inside your sleep.

~Book Two, Canto One

What is poetry but ushered charms?
And what are charms but preening magic
– if everything said somehow becomes real?

~Book Three, Canto Ten

Because of love I wanted to know everything, yet knowledge was never component to my acts. For love I gave up others’ love, counting all my costs. Love climbed up and made stations on my cross.

~ Book Five, Canto One

Choose from my smiles your sentence. Take the joy I should extinguish. Extinguish me and stoke my brain. Tear my arms, I cannot hold you. Crush my hands, I cannot touch you. I eat desire. I swallow distaste.

~ Book Three, Canto Two

When you no more could cup the earth’s small rain, I pasted pearl-cut diamonds on your cheeks. When you yourself could not detect the sky, I drew tokens of the sun each day new. When you by yourself were congealed as frost, I warmed your brittle mouth still blue and flaked. When you could not lift your hands to make your mark, I raised your arm to dip your hand in tint. Because of love I wanted to know everything, yet knowledge was never component to my acts. For love I gave up others’ love, counting all my costs. Love climbed up and made stations on my cross.

~ Book Five, Canto One

If I can fix him in dogma – if I can force him to his text – then I have defeated him – since god is still unknown. And I will color outside the lines.

- Book Three, Canto One

God is like an archer who bends a bow,
whose eye, entrained to distance, shoots a bolt
circling to his center standing up men
rushing to tides of rising fire.

~ Book Five, Canto One

If the universe is unknown it must be interpreted.
Because life is still unknown, it must be translated. 
This is the act of symbols. Each body of symbols 
is a school of poetry, an operative world. 

~ Book Five, Canto Two

In Story Theory, human stories reveal clues to the skeletal origins of the mind we possess. The material origin of the mammalian brain is irrelevant, we don’t wish to dig up bones that had a brain – all mammals had a good brain. The philosopher wishes rather to discover the origins and purpose of the Homo sapiens’ mind. Only Story Theory is designed to perform that investigation.

Article: The Snakebite of the Poet

modern epic poetry cycle

Kosmoautikon

 Explore the 5-Book Science Fiction Series by philosopher & poet Mark Chandos

"Kosmoautikon illustrates the final logic of the modern state - where Replicants replace Homo sapiens - and tells the story of what happens when American modernism is unable to reform or detect approaching danger outside of its own self-referent system."

Accuse me with your brave, tall sound. Then, already countered, men would praise me by similar idiom, which, except for me, they have not moved to innovation, nor any prophetic sound unchain my fist of text.

~ Book Three, Canto Two

That’s a thing a man can do. Teach me forgetting where the long limbs end. Where we lay the lashing tongues lick the wet root, and a strong urge to forget compliments the pleasure we desire.

~ Book Three, Canto Eight

The only answer to life
is more life. The only answer to perception is more perception.

~ Book Five, Canto Ten

The truth is less complex.
What story will you assemble from fear of extinction?
What god, yet God?
Speak, and I will mark a page.

~ Book Three, Canto Two

When I speak I borrow no dead man's feet. When you hear this sound, you know it is mine.
I use my own voice, pace, and inflection.

~ Book Five, Canto One

The fault of a church is not that it asks too much of you, but too little. Knowing demands the remotest test of knowing.

edge of pyramid with sun setting in distance among puffy white clouds

about the author

Mark Chandos is a modern American epic poet and philosopher exploring Italy, Egypt, and the world. During 21 years as a pilot in combat, Chandos survived three explosions in his desert service and began to have visions. These visions became the Kosmoautikon Epic Cycle.

Chandos shows that human reality is a phenomenon of our linguistic consciousness. That is, the universe will not be understood until consciousness is understood. He believes that his new style of epic poetry in Global English is a clear expression of the American experience of cultural power and the necessity of artistic self-examination. Why? Because all a man can do is to climb up into his own poem.

Words have no meaning until they are used in memorable speech. Chandos accepts this challenge where few poets dare. Humans are in a race for linguistic supremacy. This has meaning only when we realize that science itself operates as imaginative poetry. Chandos does not stop until his words are on the lips of the unborn.

There is margin in stone.
The poverty of tombs ensures I can yet live. Since no god could so lightly frame the enormity of what I saw. When He asks for my eyes, when He sees what I saw from attack ships, He holds His breath

~ Book Five, Canto Two

The truth is less complex.
What story will you assemble
from fear of extinction?
What god, yet God?
Speak, and I will mark a page.

~ Book Three, Canto Two

God is a story of First Mind. Man is a story of First Mind.
Love is a story of First Mind. Therefore, all that remains of
a life is story. All that we know of our ancestors is a story.
There is no reality beyond story. Thus only a story is real.

~ Book Five, Canto Two

ARTICLES ON HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

Language Requires a Deus Ex Machina  Every language has a god. Every linguistic code quickly adopts its genius  to express its projection …

Poetry is a test of justice. The human ear is able to detect justice – or the want of justice – in …

Excerpt from KOSMOAUTIKON: The Wound of Genesis is Traceable BOOK THREE; CANTO TEN 1 (Previous dialog from when Aaron was still alive.) …

Modern civilization makes a one-way voyage of  discovery. What any epoch finds permanently marks it out as unique. Gloriously, any given culture …

Man standing with his reflection

The Observer Changes The Observed

Excerpt from KOSMOAUTIKON: The Wound of Genesis is Traceable BOOK THREE; CANTO TEN 1 (Previous dialog from when Aaron was

Season your ear for prophecies.

Because I know what I saw once living in another world. It was not this world, caves of fear, where misfits crawl out crazed to die. No, you will not see the world on fire. Only a flash. Then ice.

Bring me the implements
of my voice.

~ Book One, Canto Ten

Chaos tempts me.
Phosphorus lick of luxury, Earths twisted in the lock, speech uncut: butcher’s aprons daily washed in streets, fish tightly packed in trucks with eyes on stars.

~ Book Three, Canto Eight

Choose from my smiles your sentence. Take the joy I should extinguish. Extinguish me and stoke my brain. Tear my arms, I cannot hold you. Crush my hands, I cannot touch you. I eat desire. I swallow distaste.

~ Book Three, Canto Two