"This Is an AI Town" and "Dialectic of Enlightenment at Celebrity Sports Center, circa 1984"
by c. marks
This Is an AI Town it spits people power promptly un/made flesh shelf wiser wires US critic circuit and lo, scuds cloud No historically marginalized labor was exploited in creating the seven-hundred-page manu-script of their coedited volume on gender, technology, and inequality. author never dead subject never lost in finite progression unemotional labor returning eternally robot master-servant leaks tears for ancestors annihilated by hand cut-and-pasted in outer space second naturen sci-nonfi a lazy digital stream running through it like where I earned my master’s tool endnote times meetness synod no questions, magister yesses straight down the chains of production fully automated luxury ally cruise control world wide department store window GPS chair graphics of paper pictures of type opened office or there will be data for dinner In response to query #5: Yes, as clearly stated in contract, please insert table of contents in appendix in appendix in appendix in appendix in . . . but can it make better bad poetry than I So writes, with free lance, the last mechanical turk, out of sources, the proofreading poet at the end of the line. May Day, 2026 Note: No AI was used in the composition of this poem. The poet did consult Inge’s Anagram Generator (https://ingesanagram.com/). Dialectic of Enlightenment at Celebrity Sports Center, circa 1984 What Theory Boys fail to mention is that myth veers toward enlightenment too. It wasn’t the skeeball or the videogame arcade or the waterslides It was eleven-year-old Friday night while the grownups bowled to ignore the pitchered beer It was baby witches swimming in a crowd of dust motes milling in blaring lights, spinning sounds, the shine of Michael’s glove It was that well-placed eye-catcher, pretty and silky and out of reach behind glass, a prize costing many more tickets than I would ever see There amid the teeming jangle of cheap thrills, in the days before the unions withered, when the hair was big, the lip gloss was sweet and shiny, and the jeans were blue A gaudy model of everything a girl (who’s good at being a girl) might really need to know A lavender satin crescent suspended on gossamer plastic Beads and bangles Delicately dangling A lolling striped stocking and purple-beribboned slipper No more winning No losing An exploding universe of electronic bleeps and crashing strikes and spares Eternal patience Even after gunpoint mugging in the locker room by another eleven-year-old, having a very different kind of Friday Even after learning what it means to be Made in Taiwan Even after friendship’s end, scraped knuckles on the blacktop at recess
