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: Futurism
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
Pontiac
my daughter already talks about the
car she wants an Audi, new, shiny
that her friends will admire like
her iPhone with apps that take
wrinkles out of faces in photos
I tell her about my maroon
dented station wagon, Pontiac
1986 Michigan-made to barely
last past puberty
I parked it with pride
my piece of remembering
that life is unreliable
always ready to
start then stop
blind to history my daughter
will never know the struggle of
driving a car that quit, gave up
for her they don’t exist
like rotary phones
like an indigenous name
turned into painted steel
21st Century Moon
It only keeps track of everything.
Goes by many names: ai, alexa,
amazon, fitbit, iphone, social media,
gps. Records electronic visits,
transactions, steps, sleep, calories
burned.
Dazzled, we are, to attach
ourselves to these portable pieces
of cyborg technology.
We ache deep down for robotic
efficiency, perfection like push ups
and botox injections, owned by the
machine, until we are never lost,
never found, only controlled by
predestined patterns moving our
minds this way and that, a 21st century
mechanical moon making our waves.
Daniel W. Polk 