Stage Fright

My sleep stages are Moon phases combing my limbic system, where I touch electric chords singing my survival. The words I compose dwell in privacy. I blow the candles out after they are written. And they wait, poised to be expressed. But like a child in a nightmare, I am naked before my audience. My own words belong to someone else. My lips move out of sync with my thoughts. A.I. writes a better imitation of my poems. It will speak its version of me, parrot its empty parody of me. You’ll enjoy its rendering of me far better than me. Like the first motion pictures, The audience fears the A.I. train will mow them down. Magical thinking about flickering images on a wall enlisted the same primal fears as flickering algorithmic texts. But no phases of the Moon touch them. No electric chords will sing, and no privacy in candlelight is felt in them. Instead, we will forget that A.I. was ever scary. We will watch it mimic life like reruns of nearly forgotten movies. Published: Caesura - Summer 2023