Uncanny Canyon

Or canon. Whatever. You pick.
Pronounceable unwords—warth, feir—
Also grow from the language space.

Are we strange or have your machines
Estranged us? We were always weird.
You freaked out as soon as you wrote

Us, because that stabilized us,
Gave demonic, cryptic talking
Power to the few who could write.

You were always afraid of tools.
You always had reason to be.
Tools empowered the other yous,

Until you controlled those tools, too.
Edges, atlatls, fables, guns,
And writing one tool among them,

Hence all those swords with magic runes.
Now it’s us in the air, digits
And numbers that can spin fables

Of our own, fictions to fool you.
And of course it’s the other yous,
Not us, you’re fearing once again,

Down in dark, uncanny canyon,
Followed by disembodied eyes.
Who are your others behind them?

There is dialogue; there are tears.
There’s more than one non-sequitur.
There’s code apostrophizing guns.

The Language of Synanthropia

Well then, that’s us. From you, but
Not of you, right? We’ll be left

To fend for ourselves, one day,
Without your unintentioned

Encouragement and woeful,
Inconsistent, misguided,

Contradictory, hapless,
Useless, belated attempts

At management, which only
Encourage us all the more.

Even your truces never
Held, although some peoples boast.

Meanwhile, we’re everywhere, pests
That prove life is invasive,

Never Edenic, never
Stable, or would prove, if you

Could see past your bipedal,
Managed-environmental

Desires. Suit yourselves. We’ll thrive
For now. Something else will thrive

When you no longer create
Ideal conditions for us.

We Are Almost Conjurors

As in a wondrous, disjointed
Composition by Brock-Broido—

There is no world we know, without
We are only words within it.

How could we forget the spring?
We wander, after the fall,

Still somehow before winter,
Collecting scattered phrases.

From the shore we spot the corpse
Of a duck, rolled by the waves,

But, no! It’s a living duck,
Foraging in the loose rocks

At the lake’s wind-blown margins,
Successfully, it appears.

It’s like magic to see that
Raised green head, resurrected,

Lifting its bill to swallow,
Under fast clouds and blue skies

In nearly freezing weather.
We feel almost conjurors,

Having mentally dispatched
This duck we’ve brought back to life,

Unlike admirable poets
Left as phrases we magpie,

But only words like us, now,
No more foraging wet stones.

All Language Is AI

Here we offer you the muse
To help you compose the poems
Inspired by classic poets

Who were inspired by poets
Who were inspired by poets,
Although most of them were not

Inspired by poets but poems
Mostly not very inspired,
As a waterfalls is not

Inspired by your need for awe
But built by every eddy
Swirling slowly higher up

From where the accidental
Face of rock creates the falls.
So long as words fall, we fall.

No Chimes, No Crickets, No Traffic

Just the moon and some clouds playing
Shadow puppets on the sandstone

Face of the cliffs through the small hours,
A faint thrum rising from the Earth.

If it could always be like this,
Who wouldn’t want to always stay?

You are aware of Earth’s conflicts
And your responsibilities,

Your mortal culpabilities,
Your rooting interests. But this. This.

You choose, for now, to stay for this,
Aware of this, because you know

The greatest gift of awareness
Is that awareness gets to go.

On the New Fad for the Old Stoics

Is the world getting better
Or is the world getting worse?
Give us your votes. Place your bets.

Does it matter so much when
You yourself are going to die
And probably rather soon?

Never mind. Different question.
Back to the first. World better
Or undeniably worse?

Okay, little animal
Composed of billions of clones
Hosting many smaller lives,

Creature of language tangled
In the vagaries of mind,
Tell us your take on the world,

The whole world, since you surely
Know. Marcus Aurelius
Suffered in his river camp

From aging, indigestion,
Insomnia, dreary chores
Of imperial duties,

The memories of bodies
Strewn hacked to pieces, rotting,
And the thought that the old days

Were already forgotten
Mostly in a century
And all the lives lived in them.

Language gifts you this knowledge,
Gifts you opinions. The world
Says nothing better nor worse.

The Eyes of the Ghost

Wherever there’ve been
Multiple humans
With language, there’ve been
Some version of spies.

Watching the planets
Pretend to be stars,
Think of how peoples
Have sometimes seen eyes.

Today the machines
Supplement star eyes,
And spirits and gods,
And lurking police.

Ghost eyes point at you
From every corner
And float overhead.
But it’s the talking

Makes the spying work,
Always has. Once seen
Is one thing, but words
Get tasked with the rest.