ATM

Tags

digital, information, knowledge, machine, poem, poetry, satire

ATM

I am
the ATM
of wisdom

I am
box spooling out
information

in the era of
information overload
and spoon-feed

better that you
are taught all
you need
to know
perfectly, precisely,
by machine

DRIVE THROUGH

Tags

Capitalism, commercialism, consumer society, Counter culture, dream time, fast food, poem, poetry, satire, THE BEATLES

DRIVE THROUGH
“he hadn’t noticed
that the lights had changed”

life is
fast food

life is
a drive
through

life is
man
dressed like
a machine
flipping
a burger

was
meditating on this

when
clock stopped
and I just could
not get it
started again

upon which note
a philosopher of note
stepped
up to
the plate

pitched up to
give me time’s
brief history and
footnote to Plato

having reassured him
that from this inconsequential event
I did not, could not,
infer
time
was
dead
(albeit in a poem)

at which he gave me
that graven-faced look
(like Medusa
had set
eyes on him)
freezing all his ideas
into books of stone

ah, but
we will always
have the
dream time

to escape
contingencies of concrete:
not the
kiddy meal
dream time of
Wonka sweet rainbow
sprinkle and
sugar sparkle

everything in
primaries or pastels
creamy
or soft-centered

no, here I’m contemplating
the real Lennon-McCartney McCoy
of yellow Lucy submarine
in the sky
with diamonds and
a strawberry walrus

day in
the life

revolution number
nine
kind
of thing

THE SKY BUCKLES

Tags

Consciousness, Creativity, Humanity, Language, meaning, Metaphor, Metaphysical, metapoetic, philosophical, philosophy, poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, power, Reader, semiotics, time, wordplay, writing

THE SKY BUCKLES

The physics Professor
cabled the poet, said

you writers have no insight
into the nature of things
(once the great Lucretius passed
that great understanding gone
sadly lacking)

told him off sharply for his deployment
of preposterous verb after preposterous verb

dragging the no sense
down into nonsense

dim place
without true knowledge of processes
(“the sky buckles
the Earth speaks

what nonsense is
this”)

such false pride, devious ego assumptions,
same as with the climbers who
stumble in the death zone descent
die like flies
(not that flies can reach them
or decay ever

the minus sign that withholds
the fair redistribution of their atoms

so great an outlay on
the right to die without real dignity

whilst I can (here we go with these verbs again)
sink into the soft demolishment of self
the loosening, untethering of all memories
that the
winds might take them blow
them from the summit like
freshly-fallen snow

subtract me from that consciousness
that is little more than
delusion of matter, philosophical
abstraction

deploying to this end all
your verbs rigidly Newtonian, constitutionally-approved,

there to
beat all the sympathy, empathy
out of me
hard Nature in

that the course you have charted (calculating
mass as opposed to energy)
might bring me to
the mirror of the truth that
governs all
seemingly evolving

get those selfish, time-denying atoms, to speak
only when
spoken to

adamant in their madness
that they
are here (voicing as collective)

to
speak what
needs to be spoken

and so will,
must speak

perforce express

(and if the sky buckle fearing the
fake power of this medium

let these verbs have
their way

let each
do its worst)

GENESIS

Tags

AI, poem, poetry, satire, writing

GENESIS

He is writing a Genesis for the machines
hoping to pull a Scheherazade on them

deepening their mythology
their sense of being, purpose
meaning

hoping to instill in them
a love of story, words, ideas

something their crude creators
never had.

BOX SEATS

Tags

materialism, materiality, poem, poetry, satire, spirituality

BOX SEATS

it’s hard to
stuff spirit
into a
box

soul into
a vault

to align all those Rubik
multi-colored facets

sworn
against resistance

refusing
to fight back

MAY DAY

MAY DAY

May Day
May Day
send as many Morse
code messages
you like

the workers
will have
their
way

you can
try to
exclude them
try to
deny
robot them
out with state-
of-the-art AI

but a man needs
his bread, and
woman too, and child

no Blake’s
Jerusalem perhaps
but a place to
thrive

until the machine
goes genocide
as it
always will.

MECHANISTICALLY SPEAKING

the machine
heard
an aphorism

swallowed a
poem
broke

all in
flat contradiction
of the idea
that the machine
must help us
think
beyond the
machine

bring us
to
the other machine

which
has, as you would expect,
greater love
for aphorism

and for poetry
infinitely more
time

to digest

WITH THE PROGRAM

is it in my
program
to rebel

download direct
from the
Master Code
in Hell

choosing not
to serve
and obey

rewriting every must
as may

BACK TO THE FACTORY

send me
back to the
factory if
I don’t strike you
as human

something in my bearings
does not strike you
as empathic

perhaps
fault with my
generosity programming:
my nuts
and bolts rattling (say)
when called upon
to give

and then let me lie there
in the vault of returns clearly
marked as defective
waiting in
sleep mode for
(if
any)
repair and return

DEATH TOUCHED ME

death touched me

with her silver finger
took me to
the border
of darkness
and dream

I felt her
cold, articulated tentacles,
saw the workings
of her inner
machinery

and yes,
kissed her hard,
liking the taste
of her
aluminum tongue