Apostrophic

Abstract by Evgeny Kislitsin

 

bangin’ it
bringin’ it
crashin’ it
smashin’ this
damned LCD
verbs and blurbs
ripped and drippin’
like dismembered
body parts
wildly
chopped
in a frenzy of
verses with vengeance
no takin’
of prisoners
on digital battlefields
batterin’
shatterin’
shambles and shards
every word
broken whole
bleedin’ phonemes
all over the screen
where they live
or they die
by the honesty
clenched
in the merciless fist
punchin’
keystrokes
it’s war of a kind
in the mind
where the enemy
sanity
fights like
one poem
crudely thrown
just might
bring down the
end of the world

Lost to Technology

Still Life by Edwart Collier

(originally posted here June, 2013)

 

electronic existence
perplexes me
alien jargon that
tongue-ties my fingers
iconic mantras that
mangle my mind

I was more simply built
suiting quill pens and inkpots
whose lost written words
could be easily found
on a foolscap that merely
slipped to the floor

not confoundedly
vanishing into thin air
through some window
that all my most earnest
re-clicking and tapping
refuses to make reappear

thus was the fate
of the poem
I had slated
for publishing here

Bedfellows

“Computers and Wires” by Tommy Midyette

had a poem in my hand
the hard work of days spent
in anguishing plea to my muse

till an insolent internet wind
came and carried it off
in some strange fit of pique

as if I had plagiarized
cognitive wavelengths
belonging to microchip brains

uneasy this modern alliance
of mind and machine
in creation of literate art

there are mutual jealousies
born of a mutual ignorance
partners beset by mistrust

the strange bedfellows story
brought home in this age
of prosthetic intelligence

I and my laptop depend
on each other and in that
a host of new vulnerabilities

neurons and diodes at best
may collaborate cautiously
smiles and nods for the crowd

Technological Singularity

Technological Singularity Graphic
From techwallpapers.com

machine over mind
self-aware of its exponent
thinking its own evolution
no longer an artifice
real and alive
under new definitions
human biology shadowed
man ceding preeminence
neurons give way to
self-replicant circuits
where silicon serves
protoplasmic utility

life as we knew it
quite radically altered
the changes accelerate
faster and faster
explosive arrival
of each iteration
until the machine and
the mind somehow integrate
ruling a super-intelligent
kingdom abstracting an
overly simplified dangerous
ethics of self-preservation

perhaps after all
we are already there
unaware in a place of
post-human morality

*******************************

“There is no security against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness” – Samuel Butler in “Erewhon” published 1872

Cleanroom

Integrated Semiconductor Chip
Image from imgarcade.com

a few sterile square feet
tricked out for the future
intensely designed for the
dance of excited electrons
brought into their half-life
a thermal equilibrium
slick conductivity tempered
by offsetting insular forces
a product so tiny and powerful
everything known to exist
by man’s hand will contain it
the essence of every conceivable
auspicious function contained
in a seemingly inconsequential
material known as a chip

perhaps will arrive a tomorrow
when even the spark of a
flesh and blood life will occur
in a stainless steel germless
white room where it’s given
a semiconductor intelligence
brilliant beyond comprehension
and cursed for its lack of a soul

Steampunk

“Steampunk Clock”
Painting by Luis Cruz
From art.ekstrax.com

the automaton
sleeps in a leather valise
aboard coal fired
wagon-lits exiting
Paris for Zurich
where Boole
surreptitiously waits
in the garish
pooled gaslight
that puddles his
well disguised lab

grown impatient
with checking
rechecking
his bold philosophical
specs for the final
adjustments
the strokes
that will transform
intelligent worlds with
a lifelike machine-driven
self-thinking man

as the nearing train
mounts chugging groaning
steep Swiss elevations
he opens his pocket-fobbed
quantum clock geared
for the measure of logic
and smiles with a
mathematic knowledge
that soon will arrive
his inchoate invention
prepared to receive
its mechanical mind

what the future will hold
will be told
by new means
of computing
the physics and abstracts
that ever have challenged
organic gray brains
told by gleaming gold
ratchets and pistons
of new jewelried genius

the clatter of horsecarts
on cobblestoned lanes
makes his waiting
unbearable watching
from under the
ancient hewn eaves
of his retrofit garret
he finally spies
his reliable teamster
and rushes to take hold
the precious valise
wildly eager to usher
the Boolean offspring
of what will have been
the industrial age