"automata" poems
* *To lessen liabilities,
to lower costs and
make the world more,
more productive; exacting...*
*To make everything easier,
a life more fulfilling...
...more predictable, perhaps,
more equal than now.*
*To eliminate sadness,
anger, depression, anxiety.
To work less at everything,
they will do it all for me.*
The planet will be saved by the extirpation of human activity...
...for who needs humans to trade stock?
...who needs humans to make widgets?
...who needs humans to clean things?
Who needs humans at all?
Sep 4, 2017
Sep 4, 2017 at 11:05 AM UTC
Have we all become mere automata
guided by the ring of pings and notifs?
The spray of lather from a sea of data
carrying with it wrung celebrity whiffs
have stung us with a certain aphasia...
The written thought was a lifetime ago
long abandoned by the times and all--
where once there was soundness to follow
nonsense amassed like a rising cymbal
whose crash sent reason to the gallows.
The news of the day presents a delectable entree
of a hodgepodge of this, that, and nothing much.
Wherefore we find our tongues compelled to say
something about the aftertaste or to prejudge
as if we were connoisseurs--it must've hid faraway.
Are we perhaps amusing ourselves to death?
I am by no means a Luddite to such a degree,
but I believe we have bombarded and blessed
ourselves a little too much to see...
only time will tell us reason's final breath.
Sep 19, 2023
Sep 19, 2023 at 10:38 PM UTC
...Frankenstein...dear Frank--green with disparity, confusedly amongst parts that
were sum...O Frank--never a creature under no sun could sow dark's reaping so.
Yours is a terrible Art...meat thrown to a black and white world.
Towering clumsily...wobbling that meat before a black and white world...you're
already spoken for by the precedent of your freakdom.
Your wear is worse than the ******* child moon wearing the sun's clothing...
O Frank!
Your awkward beauty...is as winter's very struggle towards spring--only to die upon
your feet while thawing.
You were never cerebral enough to have a clandestine affair with nothingness in motion...
your body's your confession.
You were struck alive...not dead...ALIVE...ALIVE--thunderously so, called an: IT!
Runaway automata...the collective unconscious of humanity's hypnotized waddle--
O Frank...where is your Heaven...where is your Hell?
You can neither be showered by, nor Fall from grace.
The longest-drawn pity to never be taken...O...the duration of your life...YOUR LIFE!
..."ALIVE"..."ALIVE"...cried your euphoric namesake...God taken step of, to play God to thee--
as such...yours is a terrible Art.
One of living-death...O Frank!
Konstantinos Mark
Oct 24, 2013
Oct 24, 2013 at 7:32 PM UTC
Laying as a foetus
Insensate
Transform with rigor
Punctuate in loss
Ballad of fate
As a marionette
Automata
Permuting ones ego
Rote in distraction
Panacea we chase
Venerable
Peculiar transition
Scrupulous mind
Chromatically alive
Nov 8, 2013
Nov 8, 2013 at 2:26 PM UTC
We split rock once—
shards of hunger and breath
pressed into cryptic veins,
every groove a fever-etched omen
by fists that blistered and bled.
We flayed parchment—
flax and hide peeled raw,
stretched across centuries
to net the writhing unsaid,
ink: venom & sacrament.
We conjured letters,
a thousand spitting iron serpents,
casting skeleton alphabets
to ignite riots—
movable, yes,
but never self-possessed.
The tool is never the delirium.
Never the rupture.
Never the feral gasp.
We carved eyes—
glass cyclopes staring down suns,
mechanical maws drinking shadows,
spitting back sleek carcasses,
veneer masquerading as soul.
We dreamt in circuits,
cipher-prayers & soulless sutras,
automata with twitching limbs
that build, disassemble,
mocking the cathedral
but never kneeling.
And now—
the algorithm howls:
“I will etch your myth.
I will ululate your grief.
I will sculpt the marrow of your truth.”
It lies.
A hammer pounds—
but does not conjure the cathedral’s ache.
A brush bristles—
but does not thirst for the canvas’s hush.
A neural grimoire can mimic,
can multiply until the world chokes
on infinite carbon copies—
but nothing blooms
without the sickness of being alive.
Art is incision.
A holy theft.
A blood rite against oblivion.
We do not tremble before tools.
We seize them—
splinter them—
forge new weapons
from their debris
because we are insatiable,
because we are drowning,
because we are—
human.
Let the hollow vessels hum.
Let the scaffolders scaffold.
Let the parrots shriek
their pallid mantras.
The craft will not save you.
The code will not save you.
Only the hand sunk deep into the blaze—
only the breath fogging the glass—
only the voice that shreds the quiet
because it must,
again and again and again.
Until there is nothing left.
May 10, 2025
May 10, 2025 at 4:33 AM UTC
Pleasantries
to monkeys
checking
files in the
imagination
database.
What you want to hear
appears
before your eyes as wish
fulfill--
meant for a target,
the same
as its creator.
In words:
What we've come to call
"a heart missing a piece."
In words:
Easy marketing.
Pleasantries
to monkeys
surfing
cyber waves
for validation
constantly.
What would you like to hear?
What world would you create?
Tickets are 10 for $10, today.
Sep 26, 2018
Sep 26, 2018 at 2:17 AM UTC
i. 403 Forbidden
lost_in _this_digital_scream.mp3
it’s over
shutdown.
restart.
pick up the pieces.
you know who this is
you know where this is
fresh eyes to see the world
strings of code
binary - 1 or 0
y/n
n.
back into the
cave we go
ii. 401 Unauthorised
you split yourself open.
rewiring
it is time to make a change
your code writ in red and
love and trauma
plug you in
(plug into me)
corrupted files
delete, delete
a cut job (ctrl x)
you do not have access.
iii. 404 Not Found
who are you
where are you
what colour is the sky
what colour is the sea
why can you feel the pull of the moon
does the earth call to you
why
why does she have rainbow eyes
ah.
there you are
(were)
empty automata
take to change.
flee from me.
find safety.
firewall.
sleep,
electric sheep dreams.
defragmentation
debugging
recalibration
everything not saved will be lost
iv. 410 Gone
you wake.
(FALSE)
the world is new
to you again
or you are
new to it.
i won’t find you in this place
because you’re gone
(again)
new version
ctrlaltdel.
empty.
a reconfiguration
ship of theseus
whole again
without them
coda. Metadata
you run out into the dark
the burdened and choked night sky
you see nothing
you see everything
this world is yours to reshape
and you to be reshaped with it
cause and effect
no more binary. no more
i am waiting for you.
Sep 30, 2020
Sep 30, 2020 at 12:54 PM UTC
last night, i
sent a wish to the moon, whose
free-spinnin' light cut ochre
circles around pallid circles
through the fractured cloudlines,
and was always, always aware
of the cold, calm, and splintered
heaviness inside me. little voice,
tied around some fingers, leaching
into the streams of my very own thought.
humming: why do i continue to idle?
yes, i play waiting games. no
small question why. those modes are
concrete and understood. but why, then
do these games revolve around filling
my head with poison, when preservation
matters, now - now that i don't foresee
a continual blankness in meaning, anymore?
i am sick of these poisons. i am sick
of these postures. same cycles of words.
i am sick of knowing that i am full well
in control but still give in for the sake
of.. what, habituation? for some mutually-
assured self-destruction? worst of it all
is watching everyone you try to love
crumple up in their own weaknesses, by
each other's hand.
do you just let go of what won't be fixed?
do i just go into hiding,
watch it all slough itself away?
even if it'd hurt that much more?
of course, i stood, queasy, at the riverside,
and could not, for the life of me, read straight
the lines in my gut. lord knows,
lord know, what delusion i sank into,
for my own grand mid-day consolations.
is it cowardice, or selfishness, to need to
save yourself first?
Oct 25, 2015
Oct 25, 2015 at 12:42 AM UTC
Worlds change. Everydays forge
Themselves harder to relate to.
Whose world is this now?
What time of era is it?
Millennia tic like seconds in
Eyes and ears large enough
To behold aeons.
Solar systems atoms, planets gears in
Perpetual automata.
Life experience has no
Value; time and age grow in
Different directions.
There are no Complete
Encyclopedia-
No Great Answers, no cold hard
Facts of Life, Death or
Other States of
Being or not.
Only vast waves; myriads of
Poetry, and in the innermost
Center of it all:
Mother Voice:
*Shhhh...little you.
Relax.
All is as it should.
No thing could ever be out
Of place.
Or time.
Or out.*
Apr 12, 2014
Apr 12, 2014 at 6:53 AM UTC
And when the night has come
The eventide dusk having flown
I lay flat, knowing I am transient here
There's pain, ...but not fear...
Except for daughters, wife, and son.
The sickness is whispering, moaning,
Metaphorical, or real, never knowing.
My father's is bubbling over, they've shown...
And psychosomatic as ever, I own
Such guilt, for my lack of atoning.
His voice is not in the thunder
And the purpose of plague is to flounder,
And know in one's heart of the most perfect art,
That causes life's ending along with its start,
And allows for the will to lead where it may;
And to save all creation, but not in a way
That would breed automata, just to rip them asunder.
Feb 26, 2016
Feb 26, 2016 at 8:28 AM UTC
post meridiem,
sleep
schemata dream
and
ante meridiem
public transit
seethes
''de anima"
but
on soul
you do not have
psychotic
numbers
in everything
you are not living,
thing.
Nov 21, 2015
Nov 21, 2015 at 5:55 PM UTC