Machine Eden

       "All watched over by machines of loving grace."
                                    --Richard Brautigan


Having established a friendship
with a machine connected to machines,
he felt better about himself.

What had analogous reality
ever done for him aside from
the conception-and-birth thing?

Nothing but problems after that.
Maybe before he dies--thanks,
reality--he'll be able, he thinks,

to live in a world completely
virtual, a self contained in
machined containment. Heaven.


hans ostrom 2020

Know Your Place

Virtual virtiginous vanity,
digital indignities,
resounding robotic rhetoric: oh,
what shall we tell the angels
when we see them? No

worries: angels own their
own hyper-reality and know
their way around algorithmic
dances that created them.

Perhaps you find yourself
wishing to turn away
from the sheer volume and mass
of human activity. Well,

you may not. It's not
allowed. Though exponentially
trivial, you remain a datum.
Know your place. And don't
leave it.


hans ostrom 2019

Viduality

Sometimes I'm an individual,
other times a dividual. More and more,
I'm a digividual harried
by image after image after
image. When I hold two contrasting

views at once, at once I become
a stereovidual, who listens gladly
to the paradoxical jazz of uncertainty,
ambiguous riffs unspooling, unresolved.

This viduality of mine's
less simple than certain very
certain individuals would
have me believe. They would
have me believe in my
singularity. Not so fast, say we.


hans ostrom 2019

Aspects of the Main Stream

In the pavilions of forbidden solitude,
citizens could not escape their screens.
And tiny hovering machines
recorded what little reflection people
could manage to generate,
for thoughtfulness was deemed
counter-productive to all aspects
of the status quo. There had been no need

to prohibit poetry, improvised musics,
philosophy, and playful disquisitions
in public squares, for all of these,
including public squares, had simply
fallen out of style, and style was all.

Self-regimentation and enervated irony
(pallid sarcasms) prevailed in those days.
The cinema and its derivatives featured
chiefly "super heroes" and sequels,
categories that rose like massive
computer-generated plinths
over the tomb of imagination.


hans ostrom 2015

Corresponding With Nostalgia

(re-posting one from 2009)

Corresponding With Nostalgia

The correspondence used to be
Composed of pulp and ink,
Now seems elaborate and slow,
Indeed antique, I think.

The mail comes digitally now,
Encoded on the air.
Yes, personality persists.
And no, it isn't fair

To say we write robotically.
The wait and weight of post--
The palpability of what
I read, I miss the most.


Yet now I'm totally plugged in,
Am tethered to my screens.
I send and post, receive and text.
("Text" now's a verb, it seems.)

A letter to Nostalgia, yes:
I think that's what I'll write.
It will come back: "No such address."
Electrons are Nostalgia's site.
*
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom