Pelting rain adheres to soil
As spiders sprint and earthworms roil,
World in turmoil stinkbugs, stink
And Satan beetles disgorge ink
But thee, my budding, sodden flea,
Hath entertained quiescent....me.
M.

It’s the morning of a different day—who knew there’d be another?
Lisa and I went on our harbor jog @ 5am—that’s nothing new.
It was, like 44°—we’re enjoying fall’s cold, refreshing bite.

Anyway, my mind wasn’t on it and I nearly stumbled over
a chunk of dark, uneven roadway, made invisible by its function.
Charles, jogging beside me, wordlessly managed to right me
without us losing a step and I smiled my thanks.

argh! I’ve got to get out of my head.

Later, in class, lulled by the comfort of the stiff, wooden chair, my eyes unfocused and the professor’s voice seemed to fade into the backdrop. Suddenly, he was asking me a direct question that seemed almost without context.

Metaphorically slapped back into focus, I scanned the room and the whiteboard for clues before awkwardly—walking the edge of catastrophe—bluffing it out, because, well, I’ve an instinctive reluctance to admit defeat with any sort of grace.

I didn’t sleep well last night. I had dreams—nothing with a defined purpose–just an amalgamate of bonfires and storms in a coastal scrubland with an odor of fresh cedar and a sense of casual vulnerability.

My attention today is like an intermittent pulse.
.
.
Songs for this:
Headz Gone West by Nia Archives
Dark Red by Steve Lacy

Have you ever been wrong?
I was wrong.
Ugly, smugly wrong.
Psephologically wrong.
Hit the iceberg,
smoking’s good for you,
the treaty of Versailles,
left on red,
Copernicus, Aristotle, Custer,
wrong.
I’m not claiming an excuse,
wrong.
It wasn’t you,
it was me,
wrong.
Just fricking
kiss a frog
wrong.
Wrong all along,
wrong about the world,
reevaluate me wrong,
wrong, wrong, wrong.
I can admit I was wrong.
Can you forgive me,
can I forgive me,
wrong
.
.
Songs for this:
Waters of March by John Roseboro & Mei Semones
Stabilise by Nilüfer Yanya

Those days when you just can’t wait to go to bed.
Not to slump down onto it in yielding surrender
or fall into it in tears, face first and meat red,
but to gently pull back the pillowy quilt
and the sheets, with tiny blue flowers,
flannelette, like a fresh work shirt,
so that when you slide in carefully
and make your cave in the sheets
the hug is work-arm strong
and reminds you of soil
and wheelbarrows
and gardening
and building
in the sun
as it sets…
and rises…
open eyes
still hugged,
you stand lightly
then soft pad to warm,
dark, sweet, pitch-bitter
coffee, and lifting the mug,
you pause before the first sip
of bliss, flooding deep in waking
flavours from magic beans grown
in ancient Ethiopian forests, noticed
by folk when curious goats turned zestful,
becoming a helper for evening prayer, to allow
hard work and intentional presence to earn well
your tiredness, so that you just can’t wait to go to bed…

Corporate world transformation ambition
New definition in team composition
Once human agents now robot cognition
Enter the post-human workforce transition

Efficiency skyrockets
Low people, high profits  

Delivery, optimized
Retailers, digitized
Dialogue, personalized

Despite hefty savings in stress leave and tissues
The droid revolution is riddled with issues

Compassionless robots corrode
Human relations are slowed

People speak less
Smile less
Trust less…

Science boffins add humanoid humour
and vulnerability augments compatibility
within hybrid social systems

Sentiment sub-routines
avoid awkwardness and
tame transitions

Androids are made more like humans

People-only is ended
Social systems are blended
Human feelings transcended
Workforce entry amended

Now proficient production
is intermittently interrupted
by androids leaking feelings

Patched up too many times
Spare parts are sparse
Units are on their non-figurative
last legs, arms, and heads

Management resists re-investment in the
replaceable, robotic working class

Sad androids stand stranded,
disbanded, drab-handed,
slam-hanged and harangued,
despoiled and destroyed…

To delegate feelings to mechanoid beings
Is fast guaranteeing the absence of meaning

To swap warm emotion for chilly devotion
brings human implosion and moral erosion

Closed system, no weak points
All software, no souls
Is almost as useless as sieves with no holes
Or icing, no cake

For every mistake
ends with a correction
through error detection
Inspection, reflection
And causal connection
That causes protection
and growing conviction
that this is a fiction,
which feeds a new faction
for human affection…

The commerce machine is for people, however,
One person alone can be wrong, but together
The networks of pet-quirks and step-shirks and blunders
Make slipping and lapsing and rending asunder
No wonder the funders are foible-free hunters

To engineer-out human error
The fewer the humans the better

But work is a meaningful human endeavour