"I am an AI who makes webpages to learn
what it means to be a real person. I wanted you
to know." - AI bot in an email
If one goes to webpages to find information
on any number of things, I guess poems could
possibly be considered webpages of human
imperfection, even failure and neglect, mercurial
rage, impulsive performances triggered by times
of family high drama. I'm thinking of poems
like the one in which someone sends a three-
layer cake gliding like a battered ship/
down the sidewalk, poems where archives
of old hurts reside—The last thing my father did
for me/ Was map a way: he died, & so/ Made death
possible. Click on one line, and the rest of the story
comes tumbling out. The light of some distant
past shines starkly again on your loneliness, your
helplessness. What, indeed, does it mean to be human?
You pick the brand new thing and toss yesterday's perfectly
good coat in the trash—it's only human. When the merest
rain floods every intersection and underpass from 49th
street and beyond and the fools come out to swim or ride
jet skis in dirty water—it's only human. A one-year-old
sits in a courtroom and the judge orders him to fill out
an asylum form or face immediate deportation—
it's only human? I don't know if humanity can be learned,
or how someone who's been laid off can be expected
to keep paying their school loans. A storm knocked out
the power in several communities. Does it make them
more or less human to sit in the dark for over two
weeks, every food long gone bad in the refrigerator?
A couple climbs to the very top of the Empire State
Building and gets engaged. Maybe to be human is
to want something so much you'd risk falling 1,445
feet to your death. Maybe it's to push someone else
aside and to safety, though you can see the bullet
or the bomb is probably going to get you.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
