Sonnet #290

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Sonnet #289

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Postemon #1

Sonnet #288

It takes damage to get to the top of the heap
It takes planned, organized damage to rise
Until all of society bends to the way your lies
about yourself, about how you can easily sleep
How you made yourself, you say, and still
The way we value cities is how we sell them
Best to men like you, who stand above and stem
the cost of damage with money, we build
each place for men like you, how you dream
how others who wish to emulate you seek to grow

The things the rich men do not want seem
To drift away: dirty work, untamed grass, unknown
people with different ways: They must fall in stream
Share your damage, demand damage built and grown

Read "Tiger" Free at Reckoning Magazine's Website

Tiger

Joe M McDermott

As a one-star Inspector General for the UN’s military police, I was uniquely positioned to assign myself any case that I chose, particularly after many years of hard assignments. I had chosen the matter of the mysterious Doolittle, a sort of multi-national guerrilla artist whose work I had encountered in my time amid the water riots of Bangladesh. The machines were dangerous, like wild animals.

I was following leads among machinists and fine artists in my region to no solution, limited by my own budget and time constraints, perfectly happy to find nothing at all until I retired and the case was old and forgotten, when I was suddenly assigned a powerful data crawler: an AI-algorithm named Deep Thor. The case was assigned his advanced intelligence analysis for three weeks, total, which is an astonishing amount of usage with a powerful AI on such a criminally trivial matter. I had no request or desire for this assistance. Apparently, Deep Thor had found a special interest in Doolittle, independently, and requested this deep dive to assist in case of terrorist escalation that was, I had to admit, possible given the machines’ high-level industrial design and the integrated radical political manifestos. I felt I was to blame. This was a result of my own official reporting intended to justify my long-continued investigations, fed back to me by machines incapable of human nuance.

Continue reading: https://reckoning.press/tiger/

Sonnet #287

All the words we've ever spoken hang in space
The energy of them, the ripple of them extend
Into the wind, itself, we are all the weathermen
We are all blowing every phoneme to the place
Where all the lost words gather. I breathe, you breathe
The breath of us spills out into the trees
It falls into the ocean eventually from capture in the leaves
It sinks into the groundwater, we drink what we seethe
Shout all you want into the endless skies
Sing every song you want to be carried
For even if we cannot hear the lingering sighs
The echo of every cry out trembles unburied
When the music plays, it never stops, it lives and dies
Out in the air: Make good music, good words, and varied

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