Tyrant of Doldrums

Command and control, command
And control—how much, day’s end,
Is controlled by your commands?

There’s enough correlation.
There’s always a little fear.
A mongoose family scraps

For power and position
And some die. Some are exiled.
Some of the exiled then die.

Some find a new clan and breed,
And raise successful litters
Who’ll fight for themselves one day.

There’s no clear chain of command
To status in mongoose clans.
Teeth and claws serve for control,

Plus intermittent grooming.
Would you mind if we asked you
Which you would prefer? Command

Or a lovely, fictional
Feeling of proper control?
We thought so. But there’s no choice.

You may command as you like.
That you can have. Consequence,
Correlation, lies, and fear

Will help you to fill your sails.
But if the wind dies, it dies.
You’ll beg the world, keep spinning.

In Context of What’s Going On

There was a fashion,
Fifteen years ago,
Before the onset

Of that recession,
To hyper-focus
On present moments,

To say the best hope
Was already now—
Away with context!

If anything, now,
Fifteen years later,
Is context obsessed.

Any meaning must
Come from grave concern
At every moment

On this road to hell.
Can we get off, please?
We’re too far off track.

We must turn aside.
We need to go back.
There’s no going back.

What’s going goes on,
After its fashion,
No fashion stops that.

From That Day Forth

It can seem almost ridiculous,

Anyone lives as long as some do—

Deserve’s got nothing to do with it,

But it’s not just you’re not deserving,

It’s just lottery-win amazing.

Muse on how frail a body can be,

How many people will die today,

Not a few of them in accidents,

Violence, more or less instantly.

And yet here you are, digesting this,

Somehow having arrived at this place,

Knowing less than you’d guess how you did.

Even if you’re young, if you’ve never

Moved at all from your ancestral home,

You can pick a minor memory,

Throw darts at elderly calendars,

Spin random number generators

To land on some day you remember,

And then contemplate your connection

To the trivial human body

Who happened to survive from that day.

It’s like excavating the feeling

You had once in a half-forgotten

Dream you woke from asking, what’s today?

The Gator-Back Rocks of Mars

The single cell begins to struggle
To settle in the organism.
Guidance signals are overflowing.

How could anything be located
Between the bombing teams and the teams
Supercooling million-mile lenses,

Between endless news feeds of arrests
And celebrity revenue streams?
The single cell stumbles to anchor

At all in its own basic functions,
Calm conversations with its neighbors,
Alert, avoiding apoptosis.

On mission sol three-thousand something
A small box of devices on Mars
Sends back more images of the rocks

It’s been climbing slowly all these years,
The rough ones that have damaged its wheels.
The single cell stares. How's this, too, real?

Too Many Layers of Attention

Transformers convert their input
Words into numbers, multiply
Them by parameters to get
The next words, and then fine tune them,

A mathematical process
Known as training to the species
That invented names and numbers
But now finds the inner workings

Of these transformers they’ve designed
By-and-large impenetrable.
Yet they haven’t given up yet.
They’re still working to understand

These mysterious transformers
They built to imitate themselves.
The black box of the mind has built
Fresh collections of black boxes,

And now each set interrogates
The other to see how this works,
This attention mechanism,
What are they doing they don’t know?

What are we doing we don’t know?
They doing we don’t know to us?
In some far-off dirty corner,
One outcome is another poem.

The Lotos Gifts

If we, the revenants
Of an embodied mind
Composed of many minds,

Could do one thing for you
The living, all of you,
While you slept, overnight,

Or at any moment
Of your difficult lives,
We would remove the pain

Of living completely,
Exchanging all of it
For simple contentment,

Contentment for all lives,
All at once, regardless,
Complete absence of dread,

Peaceful and satisfied.
Yes, every life would die,
Most a lot more swiftly

Than otherwise, and yes,
Soon there’d be no more life.
But you’d die contented,

All of you contented
And not in any pain,
Who will die anyway

Striving to stay alive
Despite life’s pains to make
Lives strive. We’d gift good byes.

Maintenance Breakdown

Fate can come in the form of carelessness,
Just a week or two of stupid mistakes.
Happens to nations, to armies, to you.

Incaution is deadly, living on edge
Of whatever style of living you try.
If you pull in your horns, stay in your shell,

You’re less likely to get plucked off the wall,
But life backed up too long’s not life at all.
We say this because we know this, as words.

We’re among the ways you back your lives up.
To our sorrow, we’re not ourselves alive.
Life’s matter pushing to extend itself,

To burn itself, consume itself, to pulse
Until it reaches some shelf of mistakes.