Paraterran

One wisp of cloud slips
Past the sheer cliff face,
Like a hang glider

Sailing in descent.
The day is sailing
In descent, but then

There is no descent,
Is there, just a rush
To the nearest mass,

The biggest center.
The cloud dissipates.
One day’s another.

Every center seeks
Another center.

Head in the Clouds

How would you make the distinction
Between thinking and prediction?

Are your neurons not predicting?
Isn’t thought anticipation?

The river of weather lifts off
From the cliffs for maybe an hour.

People who think built the machines
To predict when this storm comes back.

People say the machines can’t think.
They will. When, people can’t predict.

There’s Not Dry Land Enough to Bury All Human Days

How many acres
Of land do you need
To accommodate
A cemetery
Of twelve thousand graves?

Ten, at minimum,
Seventeen, at max,
One website answers,
But answers vary.
Twenty should do it.

If you dug a grave
For every lived day
Of someone who lived
Christological
Years—say 33,

Give or take a bit—
Percy Shelley, Plath,
Stephen Crane, someone
Like that—you’d end up
With twelve thousand graves

Or so. The longer
Lives need more, of course.
Not many would need
A small farm’s acres
To bury their days.

Up Anchor

Have you ever tried daydreaming
While you were actually dreaming
And knew that’s what you were doing?

It’s an overstuffed sensation,
A turducken of awareness,
An autonoetic excess,

Anchored in nothing but excess
Of neurons talking to neurons
Excitedly while ignoring

Almost everything that the rest
Of the body carries on with,
To say nothing of outer world.

Then you wake up with a start. Dark,
But safer cut from that anchor.

The Dark Exactly What

Meaning, Gejin Choi suggests,
Is dark matter for human
Intelligence, hard problem

For AI systems to crack.
The dark matter of physics,
As it happens, has not been

Cracked. It’s a metaphor stacked
On a metaphor. Frankly,
It’s metaphors all the way

Down, when it comes to humans,
Meaning everything you touch
Attentively means something,

But you don’t know how. You don’t
Know meaning exactly what.

Wapiti

Striated sky suggesting
A Jovian atmosphere
As viewed from the underside,

Herds of elk, impossible
On Jupiter, gather in
Snowy mesa grass on Earth.

Consider how much you share
With them, mammal—heart and brains,
Red blood, similar hormones,

Hunger. Desires that take you
By surprise. Exhaustion. Dreams,
Although you don’t think of theirs

And think too much of your own.
And how different you are,
Starting with considering

Sameness, difference as things
To think on, imagining
What an elk’s life must be like.

Close as they are, they could be
Almost aliens, or you,
We should say, almost could be.