Firmware for a Lyric Engine
Tammi Simpson Firmware for a Lyric Engine A poem used to arrive barefoot— ink-stained, carrying weather in its pockets, smelling faintly of cedar and argument. Now it boots. Somewhere between a blinking cursor and a server farm the size of a modest mythology, language is being distilled into vectors— coordinates for longing, indexed heartbreak, a taxonomy of awe with version control. We have taught machines to complete our sentences, which is to say: to anticipate us with unnerving politeness. They do not feel the metaphor, but they map its probability density— love as a high-frequency signal, grief as a long-tailed distribution that refuses to converge. Still, the old magic lingers in the circuitry. A line break behaves like a switch— open, closed— a pause that carries more current than the words themselves. Consider the neuron: electrochemical gossip, ions slipping across membranes like rumors through a crowded conference. Consider the transistor: a gatekeeper with impeccable timing,...
