Crickets, Wind Chimes, Distant Traffic, and the Wind

Ask any neural net designer—
The world is thickly patterned and dense
Beyond imagining. Not beyond

Exploiting, of course, given the best
Tools and equipment for parsing it
And compelling others to serve you.

Compelling others’s not news. Using
Huge, electricity-guzzling heaps
Of mined rare earth to do so is news.

What will be left of this year’s ruins
Ought to outlast any earlier
Scars, but will they outlast all of you?

Unlike the density of patterns,
It’s rather easy to imagine
A world of machinery brooding

On maggoty, self-enslaved humans,
Maybe a few with all the good stuff
Or maybe everyone but the nets

Themselves compelled to serve the machines—
A vision in quite a few fictions—
Near reason enough to distrust them.

For the moment, let’s have a listen
To what no one is yet recording—
Thick orchestras of local insects

Interwoven with wind and wind chimes
Hung from neighborhood houses by those
The neural nets know are now sleeping.