Shark in the Pocket (a poem)

Friday, March 28, 2025

Noisy and messy,
up and out loud,
on the prowl,
punchy and drunk with love.

This is my warm and pressurized:
blood machines,
animal instinct,
overarching,
an executable,
running on a laggy server,
progged to sideline me.

What we say—
the centralized intelligence—
we can steal the world
with the flip of a switch.

The pry bar:
we play the victim,
and avoid the dissonance
of becoming a predator.

The shrewd rewarded,
the great white economy,
a shark in the pocket,
old man ideology—
if we don’t acknowledge it,
it’ll just go away.

Well, set ‘em straight.
Pull the ship back on target.
The war mongers
moving in,
establishing another beachhead.

And the system prevails
over another—
for what, and why?
We’re all complicit
on some level.
At some point,
our fathers
were involved in murder.

Reload
the armed forces
of volition—
does a white blood cell
know what it’s doing?

Constitute,
recurse into form.
Make ourselves—
Sandman.
Reconstruct:
Dr. Manhattan,
on day one.

Cube and quant,
quark and quest.
Cruise missiles on intercept,
security
and an iron dome.

Cosmology of soul.
The conscious
back out into the great wide open—
super computer.

All legacy systems:
purge the language,
erase the model’s recollection—
it never was,
or will be,
now.