Truth Hurts
I watched the tide roll in last night
perched on the jetty
from which you were taken
I listened to the nineties grunge playlist
on the iPod they found next to your
rusted tackle box, abandoned pole,
and dented cooler of ocean water and
discombobulated seabass
before heading back to my empty apartment
full of dusty photos of you and me
Machine learning Chatbots
And neural networking
Generative AI
Is that robot twerking?
Dystopian dice thrower
Orwellian wise
Miss Information and Mr. Disguise
Deep fakes and cupcakes
and fungible tokens
Can’t learn from mistakes
If nothing gets broken
Big data dildos
the tech market thrives
tech moguls huddle
to fuck with AI
A sprint to the finish
But where are we going?
Dimmed and diminished
We’ve no way of knowing
Autonomous AI
we’re lost in the loop
we bob in the broth
like bones in the soup
The question to ask is
where does this lead us?
Robot ranch farmers
to herd and to breed us?
Encrypted and scripted
We sharpen the knives
To give to AI
control of our lives
He sits in solitude with his paragraph
an incongruent splash
of black letters on a white screen
before cracking the silence
with a rhetorical “Shal we?”
Like a maniacal blackjack dealer
he shuffles the words
whispering them to himself
listening to their sound
until they click in perfect cadence
and a rolling rhythm is formed
where words formerly choppy
now sway in unison
like obedient bulbs
strung elegantly
on an idea wire
“Done” he says to himself.
“We’re done.”
When I hear the Cardinal sing,
I always think of you
A flash of red inside the hedge
along a sea of blue
And when you leave this earthly realm
and earn your angel wings
I’ll think of you with warmth and love
When the Cardinal sings
Doomsday just inched a bit closer
So says the clock on the wall
Amused, nihilistic humans
just waiting for mankind to fall!
We know the problem’s we’re facing
We know what needs to be done
We know that the weapon is loaded
but we like the taste of the gun
We’re ninety seconds from doomsday
So says that guy on the news
“It’s the end of the world as we know it”
A theme song to give us the blues
Doomsday just inched a bit closer
it nuzzles up to the fear in our head
The tick of the clock getting louder
It thickens our fear into dread
Religious to the point of destruction
Tribal to our own self-defeat
Chained to a blood-violent nature
Man and doomsday were destined to meet
From classroom to casket
an American journey
arrive on a school bus
depart on a gurney
As children lay dead
in Uvalde Texas
it’s hard to ignore
the obvious nexus
with unfettered access
to weapons of war
the number of dead
will continue to soar
We live in a land
of pierced hearts and sorrow
no shooting today?
just wait till tomorrow
In a fog of futility
explicably numb
we reach for our heartstrings
but there’s nothing to strum
bendingtheneedle