Poem with Human Intelligence

This century is younger than me.

It dresses itself

in an overlong coat of Enlightenment thinking

despite the disappearing winter.

It twirls the light-up fidget spinner

won from the carnival of oil economies.

In this century, chatbots write poems

where starlings wander from their murmuration

into the denim-thick clouds of a storm.

When the chatbots inevitably learn

to kill their darlings,

we’ll ask if we are their darlings,

we’ll dive further inward if not or if so.

In films, the intelligent computer always arrives

at a misunderstanding of the human soul

because it lacks our ability

to lie to ourselves.

To feign hope and love through disillusion.