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This is as accurate as the future gets.
The best in fiction is rehearsed daily
Before our very eyes and I wonder:
Is it all true? The first thing I notice
Is the dazzling mix of emptinesses
In the universe and in the hands,
Each one much smaller than the last.
Like people composed of abstractions.
As ideas process, they become less
Powerful, less potent, less vehement.
From forte to mezzo, the body slow
To oppose the sharpening mind.
The arrangement is a smart idea—
One identifies with the voice rather
Than with the subjects, and the voice
Here is all too human and I find it slight
And absolutely incomprehensible—
The ways of the world are set in type
Like maybe someone composed them
On a copy terminal and then flashed
The thing on a screen to see if everything
Would fit and justify in neat little rows,
Or hyphenated so the look of it was just
Like the look that goes down straight
On the right side of the page, that magic
Side in a poem where a gully of space is.
Survival of the fittest they would laugh
And say was another way of saying it.
They would say this, would say the survival
Thing right after the copy process bit and say,
“I guess that’s another way of saying it,”
But putting it in a way that I didn’t think
They were meaning or talking about survival.
Signing on for them wasn’t really about survival
Or even a means to carry on, or to align
With any particular expression or structure.
It was more about a desire to become mainstream.
To make the next condition even. Up the middle,
With left and right behind, all around them.
I had to work a twelve-hour shift starting
At six p.m. I usually take about a two-hour
Break right away. I bought a ticket to three
Adult films and don’t remember the titles.
Scratchy, over-exposed, and make no sense.
The theater was filled with almost all men.
There is a lot of talking back and shouting
At the screen, and the feeling you might
Get beaten or propositioned is in the air.
The bathroom is for sex and drugs only.
The movie is always already in progress.
You can’t help the instinct to duck from
The assault of close-ups and huge details.
You wait for the projector’s cone of light
To get larger and brighter so you can
Claim a seat without touching anyone.
All of the experience is a disappointment.
You don’t go to a sex movie to see a film.
The only sex movies of any interest
Would probably be the ones you could
Make for yourself and your friends.
I am not sure who I am when I’m here.
The dangers here are safe and predictable.
The three Xs are like most self-evaluations
Just empty promises, meaningless marks,
Part of the ceremony like everything else.
When I got back to work it was about nine.
Sometimes I feel that when I’m sitting here
My own desires have nothing to do with what
Comes from me personally, because what
I’ll eventually put out, in a sense have already
Been “put out.” It’s one way to think about it.
A better way, perhaps, is the fact that what I see
Here is somewhat fragmented and added on to,
Something somehow more real, and this, in effect,
Makes my focus ordained, and weigh significantly
More than the spiritual displacement the view
Sometimes suggests. After all, artificial intelligence,
Like fiction, whether displaced or fabricated, makes
Reference to the particular, to the sensory details,
And these details are terrifyingly beautiful. |
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