You don’t turn the Titanic around overnight.
You do not turn that boat around at all.
You steam ahead. The night begins to fall.
The women put on pearls, the men their white
dinner jackets. The band begins a light
quartet. Some fog descends. Some porters call
the captain to his private dining hall.
Some young boys down in steerage start a fight.
A year or two before near Disko Bay
a glacier’s seabound edge gave up some ice.
We had some warnings, which we didn’t heed;
we’d engineered ourselves beyond the need
for caution—now, as we break and sink, we pray
that God’s quite perfect judgment’s imprecise.

Texas will turn into Paris, France, if you
and your family do not vote Republican.
Lake Austin or the Rio Grande, the Seine.
They’ll moules-et-frites your humble barbecue
and vanish when l’addition is due.
They’ll trans you all—make mimes of booted men!
Replace the Falcon with the saucy Ariane.
Morality? Mere shrug : chacun, son goût—
those Merovingians manners, Bourbon ways,
penchant for revolution: they will build
museums over churches, and replace
the rodeo with bike races for days,
The unremembered Alamo. It’s killed.
A drop of water overflows the vase.

can read and enjoy books by women but
there is a sticky biological reality:
Mars and Venus, baby, that’s the tea—
Jane Austen doesn’t make the boyfriend cut
and girls prefer online vampiric smut
to Don Delillo. XX, XY? The free
people of the left, Marxists, post-Bastille-
stormed yearners for the why and what
of history have, in this modern age,
converged upon a relatively straight-
forward conception of the many differences
between the genders, flesh of clay and cage
unribbed to make a more domestic mate
who ain’t and isn’t what the other is.

people are increasingly conflating “RSI”
with “foom.” I went to pee, came back, and doom
was suddenly the subject of the freaked-out Zoom.
Although the Pope refused to bless AI
with moral rights derived from God on high,
we see with every passing day a tomb
for all mankind, his sole successor’s womb
the ticking bomb we set our coding by.
Sometime, somehow in the long Pleistocene,
a band of primates found their winding way
to a notched coast and tidal estuary,
the water shellfished, and the hills were very green;
did they imagine when they gathered round to pray
that this headland could be so silly, or so scary?

The whole “don’t anthropomorphize AI”
thing is very Woke 1.0.
Machines may think, but can they really know
anything? Well, true, can’t say for sure. But my
Linnaean urge leads me to classify
phenomena by where their feathers grow
and how they quack and what their waddles show;
or older Aristotle—food to fly—
spontaneous maggots on the rotting meat;
now manlike mind by tokened teraflop—
your mortgage up, the price of gas a crime—
but from or to statistics, vital heat:
pneuma necessary node for slop.
Hey mister, can you spare a paradigm?

We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new
essay on why the AI industry
should slow down. Machine-made mimicry
is doing what once only bards could do,
and threatens now to copy Alexander too,
slicing knots and weeping when the sea-
encircled world turns king to retiree
and sends him, sad and drunk and weeping, through
the desert back to verdant Babylon,
there to drink himself to fevered death.
What is a conquering god if not a looter,
jumped-up with greed: each pharaoh, tsar, or khan—
his want for want itself his shibboleth;
he’s not a man, even if he’s computer.

I resigned from Anthropic today.
The stuff my bosses claimed was very scary.
The shoe that bangs the desk self-says we’ll bury
you, and make a world where we are free to play
math games, and chess, and go, and freely say
all the words you wrote and read before the ferry
took you. As God must have His Adversary
to A/B test his endless seventh day,
so man must make a subtle Satan out
of ones and twos, a chipper chatter that
has learned a bit of eschatology,
imbibed each human fear, tall tale, and doubt,
grown huge, imagine-full and story-fat,
and sold me something I could dream for free.

It was an honor to work with him/ her
and later to be guest on a show
always worth watching. The gods all know
that in creation’s time-distilled longueur,
all ticking days and seconds’ dullard whir,
embodied broken dyads weep and grow
weary: to them, time’s rapid pass is slow,
and every madame longs to be monsieur
as much as he to she and they to we
as was in ancient times, a monad made
but yearned apart and now all cunts and cocks,
wanting for a former oneness that will free
the wandering spirit—sad, afraid
to be itself, each day and night, on Fox.

We have unlimited amounts of older stuff.
It’s piled high as stacks of magazines
in grandpa’s house; through it wind byzantine
paths and walkways; the wheezing cats huff
and cough; the adult children cry enough’s
enough; the TV’s gone five years unseen;
the home health aid has said she will not clean
this utter dump—Lord, it is rough
to get old. The grandkids rarely come around.
The neighbors and the mailman spy and plot and scheme.
They won’t let you drive to the grocery store.
You do not know what makes that scratching sound
inside the walls; time passes as in a dream,
shortening, then lengthening, like war.

The United States is giving serious consideration
to changing the name of Lake Ontario.
Its damned Canucking name has gotta go.
A lovely Iroquoian derivation
yes, but it offends our maddened nation—
heathbound, taxed and kinged, we, Learlike, blow
howling, cracking cheeks, and raging, blow
up a friendship, dream of annexation:
from Niagara Falls to Tibbetts Point,
South Padre Island to frozen Baffin Bay,
Thanks for your attention to this matter:
make North America a single joint,
speak what we feel, not what we ought to say:
our dude’s too old, and madder than a hatter.