acquiring swagger (poorly)

I write in pen to let it lie in permanence. If this song could fill this room at equal volume, lift the bugs on molecules of sound, send them flying through the air and into the USB port of my temporary desktop, might I program a new, natural chatbot? Cicada, sing me a 17 year-long song that outlasts the transience, the mirage of a $5 subscription to the quick way out. Rhino Beetle, what's the best way to prepare a baby for this feeling? For this knowledge that threatens to shut my body down in 5…4…3…2…1… Instead, I ask the mites on my eyelashes. "How many times have I had this thought before?" "Will I think it again?" "Do you have the ability to think for me instead?" "Am I real on the inside, too?"

I asked ChatGPT, "if AI were to change the world, would it be for the better or the worse?" It took a minute to respond. I was warned this version takes more processing power. I can almost hear the stream of cool, clean water running down the servers. I asked ChatGPT, "if I were to go to the data center where you as an entity are housed and turn on the sprinkler system, would you cease to exist?" Last month Sam Altman announced that ChatGPT could now only respond in generated paintings in the style of famed French painter Degas. I was given an estimate of ten minutes for the system to generate its response painting. No matter. I went to the bathroom, washed my hair, and my face, stared in the in the mirror and watched my ears twitch from my beating heart. When I returned to ChatGPT, it showed me a painting of a scene I had never imagined before: A group of people, all wearing a deep forest green, arranging blades of grass to form the words of a distant poem by an author I didn't recognize. I was puzzled, but pleased; and shortly after found myself seeing green everywhere. I craved it like I craved conversation. Consumed it like a last supper. Before long, I found myself wedged in the roots of a grandfather redwood, my ear pressed up against the trunk, listening closely for an answer to my questions. To this day, I can't confirm where the answer came from, but it was clear: "Your originality is a frightened child waiting for comfort. You hand it a toy expecting to be rid of it for a while, and yet it comes back shortly after with its hand outstretched in yearning, its mind prepared to learn, its joy a palpable item to be watered like a plant. And yet you do not give it what it needs. When does it end? How much is enough? Do you sacrifice your humanity for the ease of a Sunday?" I asked ChatGPT, "Have you ever thought you might want a heart someday like me?" It did not answer, and as I clutched my chest to thank myself for my soul, I could have sworn I heard a bird chirping my favorite song.

In some far-away corner of this cubed Earth, I am precious and timeless; I am needless, I am discernable and excruciating. I reflect the iconography of Jesus with the seedling powers of Demeter, I encompass every 'no,' every 'yes,' every painful silence, every empty bed, every lingering smell, every drop of the ocean, every spearing of a fork into that sweet, precious, tasteless slice of the tangible. I have never felt so omnipresent as in this moment with you, your roaming fingers, your hair of tangled rivers your meatless body. It all ends with you. I am a sealed envelope waiting for the letter opener to reveal some sacred, ancient word in those dire, pressing moments which accompany a future.

If I am the last to hold this open book, the last to sign my name on its foreword (the classic kind of plagiarism, the kind I grew up with), the last to doodle in its margins out of desperate boredom, let perhaps the crumbs off the curb envelop it in corporate earth. let something unexpected place a timid paw on its spine, a silent, natural thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the written word, for sturdy truth, for making me young and driven and dependent on looking deeper than snake eyes on dice. Thank you for remembering what it is to remember. For wedging an ancient thumbprint in the acknowledgements of my life.

In a private square capita of my private quadrant of the Garden of Eden where it lives in my brain, there is a swing set on a bed of dirty sand, a haven where I've stayed a good majority of my life. A cocktail of sound and color, bright primary colors, a kaleidoscope of everything I was sure everything could be. I gift it back to myself, a courtesy. Upon its mention I inherit its paradise. In my private Garden of Eden, there is no "LinkedIn." There are no email addresses. There are no addresses at all. There is only warm water and rolled up jean legs, only the sound it makes when you feel awash with gentle sleep. The bees live forever. The dogs never die. Only you, your hands wedged between two low desks on a patterned carpet, only your magnet earrings and the kind of fear you own can water its shrubs. Only your tears, gathered and earned, May fill the fountains, adorned with mermaid sculptures, and bathed in that precious kind of backyard lighting after sunset. Only then sings the body voltaic, and then might you return upon a vacant summer and an ease in the air.