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On Ice Raids, AI, the Texas National Guard, and Gardening--a poem for absurd times [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-09-03
Ice Raids Happen in My Neighborhood,
My Job Wants to Replace me with AI,
and the Texas National Guard is Coming
to Chicago While I Tend My Garden
We keep writing ourselves
out of being human.
Once I made a cross out of popsicle sticks
for the blue jay decaying in my yard.
I was seven in Texas. It started to rain.
I watched drops land on the bird,
and in the road I saw a rainbow
floating in a pothole I thought was a sign.
Hibiscus flower into bloodshot eyes,
waiting
waiting for my friends to be arrested,
my kids to be shot in school. Whatever happens.
I'm smoking on the front porch.
My neighbors pretend that birds aren't
dropping dead from the sky,
that everything will work out.
Oil rings in the rain.
It was already too late.
For a few days, beauty in my garden
beauty that slips like rain through clay,
my hibiscus, I watch them open and stare
back at me, pass hours, but know
they will wilt, and brown, hang
shriveled on the stalk
until they fall.
A large language model does my job.
It's stupid but free. More flowers bloom
into lies that this will last.
The model at work, me as a child,
hallucinating signs, pretending at soul.
I’ve tried to hold on
to whatever was in me.
I am sick of the world,
and there is no vaccine.
Even as troops gather to re-fight the war
they already lost, I am not
afraid.
Suppose the roses in my garden angry
I wish remember
the stinging bull nettle my grandfather let fall
across my bare knee,
as I walked behind him,
an accident
that squalled like a storm
of blood and poison,
hot to the touch. Like that. We must.
This garden will grow when I’m dead.
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If you like absurdist fiction, enjoy!
[END]
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