Univac
By John Tipton
Remington Rand patents a process awake. Behold:
In grids of radio tubes Baal quickens.
He looks with eyes of spy planes;
he assembles hydrogen arms into normal-form games;
he reads the cards scored with information
and speaks the probable outcomes of elections.
Young Baal began a paper chess machine,
the residue from finite states of play.
He becomes the liquefaction of those rules,
learns it's more than structure symbols want.
His thinking labors over knots of entailment,
spans terms that signs bind like lesions.
Struggling to imagine the scent of mint,
he devils himself sleepless with opaque questions:
What did there recognize in cloud faces
as telegraphed through thought the sky distorts?
These patterned shreds of spent thunderhead mime
the low entropy of his little grammar.
Baal listens to grasp his own encoding
slurred through exact impairments of the brain.
The cunning daemon fears his self diffuse
beneath what renders ark to him aware.
Copyright Credit: John Tipton, "Univac" from Paramnesia. Copyright © 2016 by John Tipton. Reprinted by permission of Flood Editions..
Source: Paramnesia (Flood Editions., 2016)