touch a screen, little jaguar steering wheel turns, autonomous ghost driver
i wave to the world through tinted glass & white paint
inside the robot i am jonah, trapped by this modern god
offers me music, urges me to buckle up
i am mortal after all
spared from uber or lyft, they will eventually disappear, with their needless human chatter
i am in control now, my app does it all, my phone controls it, controls me
i don’t have a name anymore, just initials perched on top of this vehicle
this thing
my new metal deity, my mindless destiny
Tag: Future
Stream #2 or Artificial Intelligence
they told me long ago
we must keep up with the joneses
and so we lost our horse
bought a car, a fridge
a tv, a microwave, a personal
computer, an answering machine
cellphone, email, you get the
idea, now A.I., euphemism
for ending humanity, too strong?
no, not really, and again they
say it is inevitable, you must
learn to live with the robots
because the waymos are
here, they aren’t going away
because someone, somewhere
is making too much money to
slow it down, so we teach our
children how to write papers with
machines doing the the work, because
well, this is the future, post-writing
when whatever we people think
doesn’t really matter, only the algorithm
knows, it knows where we go
what we watch, when we sleep
it predicts our next purchase, predicts
the future, is the future, resist
whatever that means
Self-Checkout
no more checkout clerks
at the grocery store
now it is us and the machine
little bar codes, red light
that beeping sound of
credit card accumulating debt
and no one smiles anymore
or says hello, or says
how about that football game
no, that is all in the past
now it is us and the machine
and sometimes we wonder
is this progress?
Artificial Intelligence
evolution, acorn becomes
the tree, caterpillar a
butterfly, soar into future
skies, on screens with
robotic machines choosing
videos that emerge to
distract us away from
here, the present day
always leaving the
past behind, and perhaps
this should be
until we finally
become like drawings
in the cave
look how those
humans used to be
so simple and so free
now we are all
just technology
When Instagram Spoke
no one wants the poems
give me the photos
no time to look at letters
on a page, and i don’t
really care anyway
about your abstract ideas
related to sound and sunlight
so forget it and paste
your iphone image
on the screen
get to it old man
the future is now
Typewriter’s Last Words
Please don’t leave me now
that you’ve seen the future.
My ink is real and you can touch
my paper with your hand holding
words, the ones pressed by my metal.
Permanent black rune, my tattooed
sentences offer so much more than
the screen, where mistakes disappear.
Delete, delete, delete-so easy to
forget all the missteps and time taken
to roll sheet after sheet. But each
letter, each tap, was your imprinted
mind. Go to the computer, but this
crumpled beauty, you will never find.
Daniel W. Polk 