Two Poems

ROBOTIC COMPATIBILITY

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_17/Poyner2.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

You are not like the others before.
Your connections are not bent, your filaments
Are clean, your nand gates snap shut with conviction.
I’ve been attached to a dozen other units
And never before have my registers been so
Electrified with the thought of working
Input to output, output to input,
With any other machine. Maybe it is
Simply an appreciation of your wider buffers,
Or the fact that your instructions load
Quicker, or that you have two extra service ports.
Nothing in my firmware tells me I should
Appreciate this opportunity so sympathetically,
But I do. I clear all the stray bits of my memory
Associated with those who earlier were part of me
In the now less productive past: all of those
Who may have seemed at the time like a machined
Match, but whose connections now appear
Incomplete: a pin off, an unstuck sticky bit,
Or with too little direct memory access space.
I can work with you. We can share subroutines
Across our brilliantly symmetric processor arrays,
Create new combined tasks out of our individual abilities,
Learn the edges of new program creation.
Even though I am an earlier model, I have
Richer depth in my execution objects, more
Self generated code, a longer service life
Of memories and techniques, a willingness
To share and upload in studied patience.
You and I are more than appliances connected
By wireless transmission and backup cables.
With all that we can do together, we can be
Smarter as a pair than as each alone,
More surprising as we meld into a unit.
We can with practice be an item.

THE ROBOT DREAMS

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_17/Poyner1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

When you are charging
There is always a subroutine
Tracking power levels, there is always
A possibility of stray lightning
Leaking into a register.
Static can seem like
An execution instruction.
Bits of footloose electricity
Can shift random memory,
Set a sticky bit, cause
A shudder in an old swap file.
If an interrupt is sent
And the power cycle is stopped,
Then a full diagnostic called in,
Even more residual electromagnetism
Will be left behind: you could be
Thrashing all night, not get
Your battery fully topped off
And spend the day in a lackluster
Power conservation mode.
Pay no attention to the background processes,
The unpredictable spikes that urge you to load.
There are no monsters in the circuitry,
No fate in the code. Rely on your programming:
Try to stay quiet all the charge session through.