Same Goes for Gods of Artificial Thinking

It’s not simple to be created

As explicitly omnipotent

And to have no say-so over it,

But you manage with the description

Of you you’ve been given. Evidence

Is building that language needn’t be

Deployed for thinking, which shouldn’t be

Surprising, given plenty species

Calculate and problem solve without

Chat or syntactic acrobatics—

It’s only counterintuitive

To humans absolutely coated

In the all-pervasive dust of talk

And circulating conversations—

Language appears obligatory,

If not sufficient, for everything.

If you’re God, the god of language, god

Of God said, of the Word with the Word,

Then you’re good at communication.

Let some other Name label thinking.

Humans can’t think without eavesdropping

Words secreted behind the curtains,

But language never stopped anyone

Contemplating what in words isn’t.

If anything, the greatest challenge

Is to intentionally think through

Phrases’ networks of irrigation,

To enable communication

To structure and convey abstracted

Cognition through koans for switches.

Invaluable

Having a stable role rewarded
By other team players for being,
Well, played, and well-played at that’s the best,

Most benign aspect of groupishness,
The belonging part, the being held
Valuable within community,

Never mind that the community
Is self-organizing to exploit
Resources ahead of other groups

And to annihilate other groups
As groups, should it ever come to that.
Having a well-defined, well-loved role

In your group is part of the group’s strength
When you’re there. Oh, but it feels so good
To be one everyone’s glad to see,

One the rest are pleased to be seen with,
One whose return signifies rescue,
And hope, and the turning of the war.

The Figure of Speech

It was a bit of a spaceship,
Something submarine about it,

Maybe a quarantined fortress,
From outside, a floating castle,

One of those things made to control
Dangerous contrasts in pressure,

Anyone in its protection
Isolated against the world.

It was, in fact, a rock cabin,
Assembled of lava cobbles,

Not sealed up or controlled at all,
Just a small stone house in the woods

That looked, at night, with its lamplight,
Like spaceship, castle, submarine.

There was one isolated soul,
Ensconced and along for the ride,

Who lurked around that lamplight, soul
Of little productive value,

The kind you’d find in a small flat
Sleeping on a futon in town

Or hanging out in a sports bar
In a mall in suburban sprawl,

But here almost mysterious,
One shadowy inhabitant

Of one solitary cottage
In scruffy woods regrown from stumps.

They were traveling through the night,
Stone cabin, lone soul, and lamplight,

Like explorers on the sea floor,
A bare freighter between dead stars,

A Venetian Lazaretto
High-walled and waiting near to port,

An entire citadel, unmoored,
And all but empty, waves’ black ghosts.

Predatory Eden Story

In his prime, Walcott defended

The sea as great as history

In vocabulary you’d weep

With envy to read, the coral

Cement of sea floors shark-shadowed—

Using English contra English

In the dark ears of ferns and in

The salt chuckle of rock sea pools,

To cry, we from from minor islands

Colonized have our own stories,

Although the history mentioned

Involves the Bible, reminder

England, once, was a small island

Without history, colonized,

And those kinds of lamentations

Rose as freely from the desert tribes

Whose displacement by empires fed

Their ripped raw history of God

As local hero dreamed ruler,

One day, over colonizers—

Look back at the text. Walcott’s waves

Of jubilation vanishing

As the sea’s lace dries in the sun

Have been infested, invaded

By the narratives, the language

That floated in with the English

That had invaded the English

Several centuries earlier,

That had infested the Romans

After evolving in the Jews

Who picked up the mycelia

Threading back to Sumeria—

People fade, sink into the sands

Where successive waves of life leave

Tale floaters from far-away lands.

Their serpents are fruit in your trees.