Sentenced to Sentience

*Sonnet for Kubrick

 

In the sing-song dream of a cash machine

and a typewriter’s lukewarm steel return

several shining gentlemen will earn

symbols to face their love in evening green.

As pulp sheets unfold from the Pleistocene

elsewhere, the vertebrate at her lectern

praises the features of a certain fern,

opposing columns in a magazine.

 

Untethered from the cleat of our own selves,

we gave the task to a handful of chips.

Silicon, now mined, will be the one delves

into that which we spat from salted lips —

the lone spaceman cleaning a ship so spare,

tessellation of a bone in the air.