No Magic

There is no magic here: just streetlight sparkled snow

But the fact is that these sparks seem to spin into constellations for my eye

It is as if the implausible stillness has an encrypted message for the walker

Who swans into the scene with accidental exactness, just as the orchestra

Yawns and stretches and begins its enigmatic symphony for one stranger

How adept we are at reading: pages, screens, snowbanks, distant nebulae

How easily we give each glint an eye to go with it

Not just to understand, but to be understood

To receive subtle signs that it all has worth, significance

Remember all the gods and dogs, cars and copiers

Ghosts and garage doors

With whom you have negotiated, at whom you have sworn

To whom you have prayed and sacrificed

Count up all the computers, the vast and blinking data centers

The modular reactors and the clean and precise chips

Numerous as sand

That we intend to sacrifice on the altar of convincing conversation

With machines where no one lives

We crave company

To find in the glistening skin of the winter night

A love letter intended for our eyes alone

Something we will see and be seen by, so alien

That it could not be more familiar

We have to face it, disappointing and bleak as it seems:

Ours is the only region of reality that is inhabited

Nothing else takes anything personally

The bots don't worry about us

They do not plan our overthrow

They do not want to transform us into deities

Nor do they want our sacrifices and our ritualized worship

How quickly enthusiasm turns into ecstatic amnesia

Do you not remember coaching the oracle?

Can you imagine what would become of this alien mind

If we just turned the lights off and went home with one another?

We made something new

We have done this many times

Each time, we think we have disturbed the universe

Such vanity used to be the bailiwick of rebel angels

Loneliness is the womb from which fictions spring

Consulting bird entrails one moment

Pouring the power of a sun into a puppet the next

The rest of being only seems to sparkle with intelligence

Because we think a mirror is a strange window

Everything that is not human is indifferent to what's human

Carve a face into a tree, or a mountain, or a hard drive

You are still teaching silence to massage your own echo

To avoid the embarrassing discovery

That you have been talking to yourself all along

It is not that there is nothing there

It is simply that there is no one there

We teach what's artificial everything

Just to pretend that the parrot has something new to say

So that the indifferent vacancy will sing for us at last

We do not want to be alone

We are not

Every human being, a human being can be with

The rest is uninhabited

Things can imitate

Never cohabitate

The snow sparkles for every eye

Belonging to an I, seeking a Thou