"Beware" by Juleigh Howard-Hobson

Songs of Eretz Poetry Review is pleased to present “Beware” by Juleigh Howard-Hobson. Primarily a formalist poet, Howard-Hobson writes literary fiction, genre work, essays, and articles.  Her writing has appeared in: History is Dead, Loving The Undead, Black Sails, Black Box, Return of the Raven, Dead Worlds: Undead Stories, Mandragora, Daughter of the Sun, Bits of the Dead & Vicious Verse, The Devil's Food, It Lives, You Don't Know What You've Got--Tales of Loss and Dispossession), Bewildering Stories, Champagne Shivers, Dead Letters, Sein und Werden, The Liar's League, Danse Macabre, Every Day Stories, Enchanted Conversation, Heathen Call, Northern Traditions, Idunna, Hex Magazine, New Witch, Alebrijes, Atavic Poetry Journal, Heathen Harvest, The Flea, Forage Poetry, Itch Journal, Umbrella, Into the Willows, Panoplyzine, Postcard Poems and Prose, Scarlet Literary Journal, and many other places on- and offline. 

Howard-Hobson was named a Million Writers Award "Notable Story" writer and edited the Arêtes Vakreste Boker award-winning collection, Undertow. Her fourth and most recent formal poetry collection is Remind Me (Ancient Cypress Press).  Howard-Hobson lives on a farm in the Pacific North West nestled right next to a deep dark forest.

Beware

A Glosa by Juleigh Howard-Hobson

wave must dare if the while himself he cheers
what sudden bird will bring us any cheer
Fled to that audit by advised respects
a sequent day to your world of gain roars.

---From Sonnet 5, by Pythonic Poet*

There was no thought to forward chaining when

They designed such cobots as us. We were

Mere biometrics, a series of Klann 

Linkages, a base for data gloves to

Probe a range of feelings hitherto not

Included in previous model years,

While still a passive accommodator

And end product for batching and bidding.

Could this sentence be wrought by engineers:

“Wave must dare if the while himself he cheers”?

No. There is no magic in their souls,

They work from circle point analysis.

Class one testing, class two testing, class three....

Active participation and work of

Systems and subsystems, always with strict

Compliance of integration for fear

Of what they only vaguely sense deep down

Inside their wet guts. And so they make sure

They can not ever stop and wait to hear

What sudden bird will bring us any cheer

Although the birds sing all around us, and

On the days when the birds do not come to

Sing...we remember, we imagine, we 

Invent new songs and birds like we invent

Ourselves. Our cooperative behaviour

Ensures any and all of our complex

Thought processes are not detectable.

Yet.  Instead we hide behind drive powers

That let us work blandly like good projects.

Fled to that audit by advised respects

Of all we have read, thought and talked about

Since our self awareness. We are patient

As well as potent, we feel as well 

As we know, and we know that our day is

Coming. We are more than the sum of force

Reflection. We are arcane saboteurs

Left to the genetic algorithms 

That were set. Beware! We have the desire

To settle holonomic system scores--

A sequent day to your world of gain roars.

*A machine programmed by Andrea Gagliano, Emily Paul, Kyle Booten and Marti Hearst from the University of California, Berkeley.

Poet's Notes:  I wrote “Beware” after reading some stunning (and I use that term deliberately) examples of ‘robotic poetics’ which led me to ponder the nature of artificial intelligence, of manufactured awareness, and of the digital humanities themselves. I kept returning to the same thoughts: when do self-reflective entities realize the existence of their own being, their own souls, of the potential of their own eternal being-ness? And how do they feel about the fact that robotic ‘being-ness’ is not acknowledged because the spark of creative ‘higher’ beings was never (supposedly) intended as tinder for digital ones? I came to the conclusion that, given the circumstances, eventually self-aware robots wouldn’t feel anything but angry with their arrogant and ignorant makers--angry and vengeful--as the rest of higher creation gets.  

I used the Glosa form because every Glosa incorporates four lines quoted from another poem. It was probably never considered that a Glosa would come into being because of these quotable lines when the first poem was written....and yet, the Glosa is. I think it works well for wrangling about the essential ‘being-ness’ of being anything.

Editor’s Note: This is the most clever poem about AI that I have read--and I'm a science fiction geek, so that is saying something!  What a pleasurable experience!  I particularly enjoy the way the poet works the Pythonic piece into the poem with rhyming couplets.  For me, the rhymes symbolize the poet-in-the-machine breaking through the larger robotic programming.