Welcome to the Machine (a poem)

Tuesday, March 4, 2025

A deep ache in the spirit—
if I were to say, what would I be?
The same as before: nothing.
So why not?

The waste of theirs, hidden in obscurity,
becomes our abject effort
to be something,
to mean a moment,
to get us all to feel again.

Beyond the machine—
the leaps and bounds,
the single building;
the compute of one, an entire world
in the palm of my hands,
running on server farms across three continents.

The shared blacklists,
a unified, categorical deniability—
that’s what the data says.
Chart the points:
obvious growth,
but not what they expected.
Off with his head.

The soul’s disintegration
in the cascade of spreadsheets,
covering the corpse of me;
red ink, upside down,
pouring into oblivion.
You know what this is:
Neolithic, Jurassic 16.
I’m still gonna see.

Type mojo—are you feeling me?

I’ll lay it out for you:
Cocoa Puffs and Lionel,
the Scarecrow and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Men.

An intelligence—natural, artificial, and augmented—
walks into a bar.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

Welcome to the machine.