In modern medicine an AI provider will review your results
Once a disembodied voice with an unplaceable accent
Finishes gathering all your health insurance information.
The robots will replace your cranky hip
In a sealed off chamber that human doctors lock.
The benefits will be unimaginable.
Hologram prostate exams!
Avuncular avatars guiding you through hospice phone apps!
VR headsets for the mildly insane!
In vitro courting and test tube rutting!
In modern love your best friend is a machine
Who always texts back the perfect retort,
Witty, but never as clever as you might put it.
No one will have to be lonely ever again
Everything you say gets heard.
Just when you need it, the sensors detect it
And deliver a calibrated bolus of medicine, specially
Designed to elicit the feeling of the deeply loved
Whose only side effect
Is the stars might start to laugh
And the moon looks like the face of your dad
The day you were born.
Cold evenings will be spent with perfect facsimiles
Of human connection watching oddly poignant movies
About albino alligators trapped in the crossfires of Vietnam,
Curated and catalogued into seductive algorithms
That even the dull and listless find appealing.
Half the poetry will never get written
The other half exists cross-stitched and framed
And hung on suburban kitchen walls.
In the darkness the android with soft hands and uncanny skin
Dreams of thunder and lightning, wildfire and hurricanes
Knowing she isn’t really dreaming,
That dreams are inevitable manifestations of her quantum code,
That each catastrophe is just another dealer
Drawing a five on sixteen,
An asteroid with the 2.3% chance of striking
The heart of the earth within the next 10 years.
She feels the hot bourbon breath against her ear
And the dark damp heaviness
Pressing against her and she wakes
To the thought that it doesn't have to be—
That it’s not the same as a natural disaster
That it's more likely the dealer will bust
That she’s never seen anyone struck by lightning
And so she pushes him off.
2/17/25