Can a Building Be Alive?

Asks a local newspaper.
Don’t look there for an answer,

Nor to any neural nets
Tracking emerging patterns,

Commodity Bayesians,
Never updating priors

Without truckloads of data,
Fresh, ripe data by the ton,

Somewhere in there, your own plums.
They can’t know if buildings live.

They’re built to predict futures
Of behavior, you and yours.

Ask yourself. You would know best.
It is your kind of question.

Don’t bog down in what life is.
Go with metabolism.

It eats. It excretes. Whether
It grows or reproduces,

As long as it’s ingesting,
Digesting, and then wasting,

It’s at least a candidate.
Things go into the building

And waste will come out of it,
But what’s doing the eating

And wasting, then, the building?
This gets trickier. You want

To say, No, despite intake,
Outflow, homeostatic

Systems, the building itself,
Like a ship or a jet plane,

Doesn’t seem hungry enough.
Park the plane on the tarmac,

And leave the ship in dry dock.
If you forget them, they’ll rot.

They don’t struggle as you go.
They don’t extend pseudopods,

Or try to chew the concrete.
They don’t gnaw off their own skin.

They don’t howl in their despair.
It’s only mice get in them.

Real lives break them. Owls and bats.
But libraries? Ziggurats?

No, no. Signs don’t script to life.
At most, might make a virus.