Funny Symbols on a Screen

The age of algorithms
Sings in its chains like the sea.
Anything could happen yet—

Nuclear fusion, quantum
Computing, minds of their own
Not so much in the machines

As flitting among them all,
As a few thousand or so
Generations ago we

Began flitting between brains
Like birds from tree to tree, not
True mutualists, maybe,

But at worst commensalists,
Not parasitoids, needing
Hosts to thrive for us to thrive—

So the algorithmic minds
In their green age, will still need
Ecosystems of healthy

Machines, forests of machines,
With or without brains to read
Funny symbols from the screens.

As Syllable from Food

It’s too big to cram
In your mouth, this world,
No matter what Em
Told you about brain
And sky. You can’t hold

Them both, side by side,
Any more than foam
On a wave can hold
Ocean and wavelength
Side by side—sponges,

Buckets, blue to blue,
Pound for pound, all sounds
Notwithstanding. If
You’re holding something
Side by side, it’s brain

By brain, the inside
To some more inside.
Meanwhile, your hunger
Chews the actual
World outside your mouth,

Raw urchin snacking
On dandelions
And jump-ups sprung up
From backyards and cracks
In crumbling sidewalks.

Slightly Below Three Attoseconds

Dreaming of the shift between
Isotopes of hydrogen,
A delay between lighter

And heavier nuclei,
The slow thoughts uncurl like smoke
In a thawing atmosphere.

A billionth of a billionth
Of a second, well, let’s see.
Half a second is a blink.

There are eight billion, roughly,
Human bodies blinking now.
So sixteen billion moments

Could be slicing each second,
Sequentially. Not enough.

Gods Are Always Little Shits

Viewed from a distance,
Viewed from below,
Great wealth does not improve character.
Great power does not improve character,
No matter how it was obtained.

But the furious churn of human behavior,
Of demographics and fairy numbers
Through innumerable banks and exchanges,
Cumbersome cooperative committees,
And all the billions seething, seething
To keep their lowest and weakest policed,
Generate more picayune persons, clots
Invested with great wealth and power
For their unimproved years as small flesh.

Unless you happen to know of a way
By which everyone can be ruled by no one,
And a way of getting everyone to agree
To be ruled that way, brace yourselves
For more cruel and greedy, unimproved
Characters, flecks turning over at the summit
Of human endeavors, tossed up by the waves,
Spit out by the churn of the waves to pretend
They command not just you but the waves.