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
Tag: innovation
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?
Daniel W. Polk 