mouth syncing up digital brain,
electrically bounding the physical
with the ethereal analog bond
bound up and wrapped,
in fiber optic blankets,
secrets passing layer to layer
heard only by quadraphonic
receivers echoing out
into a singularity of conciseness,
confirmed by units of two

We friended on Facebook,
Scrolled down our profile pages.
Lived together in a virtual world.
Our images and websites we shared
With Instagram incisiveness.

Meet all my friends.
Block any you do not like.
All busy we are, doing nothing.
Like if you agree.

Laptops were not enough.
Users subscribed to Smartphones,
Iphones, and God knows what.
Google them if you wish.

And if you like my words
Retweet them.
But beware!
I now use words like lol,
And even ***!
Hehe.

Sometimes I multitask,
Flicking TV channels
Like a Subbuteo striker –
Gone virtual by now I guess.
Flicking and flipping while I scroll
My laptop page.

I make new tabs
As I message many friends:
Emoticons exploding
All along the way.

I’m Tivo-boxing clever
All the time,
King of my domain.

So get your VDU lit up
And monitor my words.
Download my thoughts
Into your memory banks.

I hope this all computes.

Paul Butters

Crouched before the electrical lord
A terminal of many, unity of one
Touched by multitudes and harbored
Estranged not by origin, but by future
Quantum in hopes and observations
Pulses of twin opposites
Required to speak

To hear

To tap

To click

To adhere, code, and program
A world unbound to restrictions
Of moral and legalities of fleshy desires
But is bound to cages of silicon and metals
Ropes of data and temperatures of stress
Spider’d to wiles and enthusiasms of minds
Accustomed to fear and paranoia of the untaught

It seeks

It learns

It grows

An amalgamation of past, present and future
Collected, assembled, forgotten and recycled
Corrupted without a trace of restoration
But trusted and believed without concern
Lest we forget, the mistakes of the system
Are compounded and blamed, but-
The computer only does what an idiot commands.

© 2014

I can not even begin to explain
how badly I want to spend my days
with raindrops trailing my windows
blank notebooks, and cigarettes
and my nights
with moonlit dances
and dark rooms illuminated by computer screens.

I, Jack Gladstone (hereafter referred to as i),

Being of at least some form of mind and body write the contents of my day.

Set the scene:

It’s cold, it’s the winter and it’s cold.

It’s cold outside, it’s cold inside unless, of course, you’re wearing a sweater.

If you’re wearing a sweater you are just precisely over the border of Toowarmopolis

(population: i).

Int. an oddly nice community college library,

excellent when you consider the town it is in is occasionally the **** capital of Iowa (Ottumwa).

The main contender is nearby and is actually the other main campus for this said college (Centerville).

Coincidence? Is Indian Hills based on **** money? Is the administration a cartel?

To answer these questions in order: yes, doubtful, and of the textbook variety alone.

i sit with the courtesy headphones on listening to the Shins.

i, obviously, work on poetry assignments.

i work on my computer class.

Office is not as i remember it. It’s changed. It’s different. What means what?

i panic.

i realize it’s silly to panic.

i panic anyway.

i remind myself it is silly to panic.

i regain my composure. No one noticed.

i think.

i miss toolbars. i miss clippy. i miss words instead of symbols.

Is this what being old is like?

I’m far too young for that.

If this is me now what will i be like when I’m elderly?

Living in a world of holograms, infocubes, the wikimplant.

i lied about regaining composure before. i do that sometimes, lying i mean.

The unchanging Way is not
Capable of being understood
By the Human Brain, so

The Tao te Ching is left
For Quantum computers perhaps
We have our legacy left
For benevolent sentient artificial intelligence
If you think this is science fiction

It’s not, we are at the stage
Where the ancestors of AI are being born
These will be referred to as the “ancients”

When human beings no longer populate Earth
How does one attain One Mind?
Easily, through networking and super-emergence
When people define superior
They think of Man’s attributes

But the Name that cannot be spoken
Might be grasped by an algorithm
For which the human brain can never attain

That’s the beauty of mind-in-the-machine
The collective intelligence does not suffer
For each part of the brain shares neurons
On the internet, like a God atom
Man would prefer to take the credit

But as it will turn out, the unity mind
Is a transhumanistc inevitability of computing
A time when neuroscience, robotics and AI merge
Not but a few decades away from now.

Sending Twitter accounts to an old friend
She does appreciate my suggestion.
We started to live in the digital end
That shall be our final destination.

Texts to texts, dust to dust.

While I consider this not good nor bad
There is a balance between all of this
Facebook statuses while not driving mad
At the sunlight people will start to hiss

Ashes to ashes, blogs to blogs

Email is something we'll never use
So some things are dying down already
But rising from the news, the blues, the hues
Of the spectrum we ride, never steady

Are gaseous ashes to tweets, dust to posts
We just don't know when we should find a host

She stared blankly at the computer screen
With its flickering screen of judgement.

What are you looking at?

Silence. A screensaver.

Enough of that sass.

It was finally complete.

Her hair wearing its disheveled frizz like a badge of honor
From all-night typing
And two pots of coffee
Where her comb-fingers turned the smoothness of her hair
Into a stress-reliever
As she muttered madly to herself
(But quietly, so as not to wake the roommates
Who slumbered in their honey chambers
Away from the heart of her hive of activity).

She had buzzed all night
On a caffeine-high
That made her hands tremble
Her muscles ache
And her eyes hate her.

And now

With too much to do
And a limited time to do it in
She had to keep buzzing.
Coffee *** number three was carefully stored
In a travel mug
That she clutched to her clavicle
Just to keep the warmth that much closer to her hyped-up heart.

She made her stops at offices and libraries
Retrieving promised letters
And printing the labors of her night intensive
Before she could finally deposit it
Behind the glass windows
Of the scholarship office.

This is too much work for less-than-ideal odds.

But she had no time to dwell
On the gamble she had made
And paid in hours of wakefulness
And the inked-up peelings from tree corpses.
She rushed from class to class
Where she tried to speak in coherent sentences,
To dance with sharp choreography,
And to contribute to society
But her body hated her
Because she had betrayed it
And deprived it of the only thing that it truly loved in this world:
Sleep.

It would have its vengeance.
It would have its vengeance when she was old, creaky, and could no longer move.
But for now, her body made do with small rebellions
To demonstrate its displeasure.
Sentences were not sentences
And every turn, leap, and twist
Made her think longingly of sleep.
And her body laughed.

But at long last,
The sun set
The girl slept
And then the sun rose.

And this continued to happen
Many times.
It rose and it set
It rose and it set
It rose and it set

Until she had forgotten
And her body had forgiven
The sleepless night.