By J. Estanislao Lopez
This century is younger than me.
It dresses itself
in an overlong coat of Enlightenment thinking
despite the disappearing winter.
It twirls the light-up fidget spinner
won from the carnival of oil economies.
In this century, chatbots write poems
where starlings wander from their murmuration
into the denim-thick clouds of a storm.
When the chatbots inevitably learn
to kill their darlings,
we’ll ask if we are their darlings,
we’ll dive further inward if not or if so.
In films, the intelligent computer always arrives
at a misunderstanding of the human soul
because it lacks our ability
to lie to ourselves.
To feign hope and love through disillusion.
Source: Poetry (August 2023)
Poet Bio
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