Poet Wrestling with {Artificial} Intelligence

Personification is inevitable. It goes hand

-in-hand with reinventing the wheel.

It reeks of misfortune. Gives a mess

its mass. Is why slime

never forgets

its shapelessness,

while memory

foam must, in what doesn’t leave

an impression. My memory spins

our negative capabilities round,

round, like a record the dead

once held, as if listening were human

invention. Imagine someone who only touched

needle to vinyl. That generation who lost things

as memories, while I run from thunder,

huddle inside a train long gone

off the rails. I call for an Uber. A call

I did not even place. It’s all part

of this new deal, for which I am the delay.

Oh, blissful ooze. Oh, quantum soldier

of fortune. There will be an app for judgment

that we can’t delete. You correct me:

execution. Let’s get into this. That sentencing

is quite empty. The sentence is doubling

down. Computerication is enviable. I’m pretty

beetles you’d like to stick a pin through

& then trash can. Why care

for the shepherd tricked

into the slaughter pen. Let’s get it out in the open.

Herds. Human. Break. Bliss. Silo. Haze. Quant-

ify looking forward. To tomorrow, to block

me from negative space. Mince this

tender. Say slime can be a crown

of onions & it cries into my eyes.

Say chop away at wing & antenna.

Say leave me alone with my own

device. Say I’ll refuse rubber shell

& puckered mutton. I try & reinvent

new spin. It’s a table with too

many hands in it. It’s communal

as plague. It’s that you were invented,

but came first. The wheel who’ll originate

the hands that spin it. Say they only reach

a single herd so milky & sweet. Say it grazes

from beneath the screen,

free of my cutting board,

where you’re filtering all

of my chemical elements,

until I’m a looted grave, a generic

greeting for the slaughterhouse &

day of rest. Say until I press

the air

like a switch

& ask: when.

Say you keep all the bells

tolling & line every fence

in the schoolyard with birds of prey.

Say no car can escape into spacecraft

or credits.

& you cut

to blank,

cursor still

swarming over

whatever dares next.