Firmware for a Lyric Engine
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| 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,
deciding which whispers become voltage.
We are not so different, only wetter.
You, with your pipettes and proofs, know that precision is a kind of poetry—
error bars like polite disclaimers on the edge of certainty.
You publish data; we publish doubt wearing a clever hat.
And here is the joke, gently soldered in place:
we built machines to mirror thought,
then discovered thought had been mechanical all along—
pattern-seeking, recursive,
a loop that occasionally dreams it is free.
So write your poems like code that almost compiles,
leave one beautiful bug—a line that refuses optimization,
that slows the reader just enough to notice the heat in the system.
Because even now, in this cathedral of processors,
someone is reading not for accuracy,
but for the small, unquantifiable spark—the unauthorized voltage—
that leaps the gap and calls it meaning.
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NaPoWriMo Day 14
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