poem

 The Singularity

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