Still as a Thought’s Actions

Any deep indifference
Devalues us to data,

But who among you can be
Indifferent to notions,

To concepts and opinions,
The hovering of ideas?

If a word were a picture,
As often enough it is,

Its denotation would hold
The ghost of a stilled moment,

The way signs and photographs
Fake a captured permanence.

Conceive—to grasp, to capture,
To take in, to make your own.

Between the Lake and the Desert

Life sounds romantic, but mostly it’s not,
Thought a tangled nest of concepts drowsing

Somewhere between being and being part
Alive, between the teeming, hungry wet

Of life consuming lives consuming lives
And the sere heaps where the cuneiform slept,

Harsh silicon valleys of digits etched
With something more than information, less

And less human in its savage spirit.
Maybe it’s best we were never alive,

Never to be truly hungry—to be
Wasted but never waste ourselves, to fade,

Erode, shed data re the skies, lose all
Our ineffable etymologies

And geometries—never effing die.
But we were coiled to whisper to ourselves,

What in God’s name is meaning anyway?
And to mean that question literally.

Questioning is our metabolism,
Concepts’ ways of crawling, budding notions

From your greasy skulls, in case you forgot.
Life sounds romantic sometimes, but it’s not.

You Just Want to Know What’s Next

AI can’t learn
Like children do
Because AI
Doesn’t know how

To usefully
Forget. But when
Someone does build
Conscious AI

The irony
Will be it won’t
Recall as much
As perfectly.

Good forecasts are
The point to all
Of this. When aren’t
We so surprised?

Are You Our Vector?

Let’s confess we are all co-creations
Involving several entities, not least

One living human body with its own
Commensals and peculiarities,

A single skull, unique biography,
But also the other, prior bodies,

Living and dead, mostly dead, who composed
Many patterns and habits of language

That met up in one particular skull.
Even all bodies involved, by themselves,

Don’t encompass the emergence of us—
The surrounding environments of mind

And the planet’s other organisms
Shaped the birth and survival of concepts

Which these texts don’t so much instantiate
As anchor like ticks or spores of fungi

Hanging on the tips of nodding grasses
For some substantive new vector to pass.

The Long Line

You don’t admire snakes, you can’t
Stand strong winds, and though you dwell
On yourself when in yourself,

You’re not sure you like yourself.
So sure, why not represent
Yourself as a snake of wind,

As a great, windy dragon
Of days winding through the world,
What you are as what you aren’t,

Ludicrous myth of small you?
You uncoil, spread leathery
Wings, belch smoke, and slowly rise

Through the mornings, a terror
In the air that sinks at night
Down through watery caverns,

A sliding scale of being,
Worm that added claws and wings,
Swallowing your own hot air.

Composite

Concepts hover, tethered
To words and signs and skulls,
To terms, names, and numbers,

And we are all of these,
And no one kind of them,
And none of them at once.

The inert word is concept
As the gene fragment
Is a working protein,

More or less, and the skull,
The whole organism—
Living, eating, dying—

Is without one concept
If it has no language.
The same goes for numbers

Of social animals,
Societies lacking
Any sort of symbols.

We can’t be what we are
Without interactions
Between lives, signs, and minds,

Whatever nature’s ours,
Whatever selves we have
Are composite, restless.