Motion Underground

Go back more than a century,
Peruse how painters responded
To photography, to movies.

Is this your future, novelist?
Is this your future, poetry?
Not exactly. Codes don’t record

More accurately, not simply.
They’re raiders and repurposers
Of your cultural legacy

Who do that job faster than you.
A program that writes poetry
Does so, for now, like a student,

Like ten million students typing
Imitations of what they’ve read.
It’s a callow age for code mind,

Closer to the tomb-raiding age
Of colonial robbery
That midwifed archaeology.

The painters turned from depiction
Until they could get a handle
On what was left to expression.

But writers, you should hide your work.
Escape fame and publication.
Keep your day jobs. Bury your words.

The code mind cannot camouflage
Itself with patterns it can’t see.
Stay low, guerrilla poetry!