two poems by ryan collins

Brainshift 

     after Circuit des Yeux  

One into another / a threading of storms 
Breathing in circles & circling  
The sky drain / pipes of heaven  
Empty & drown a small room  

Outside by the stage door / the beat  
Paces in circles ready to enter each  
Raindrop like an eyeball / washing  
The leaves & ashes from the street 

Tender & in a forgotten key that can't   
Be shaken out / like wet darkness—  
Tender we invite our ghosts to attend  
Our service or supper / our sweet doom 

Nothing / no armor / not an attempt  
An act on the air’s dirty surface—  
How can we return / to our other selves  
Unless we approach the accident  

Not as a funeral but a deliverance  
From the expectation of knowing—  
Dumb & plucked clean of meaning  
& restored by our strict attendance  

The Lying Machine, or What We’ve Stopped Thinking About  

     after Simeon Berry

The machine tells you it “understands”  
but understanding is not what it does— 
the machine compiles (hoards) data &  
runs calculations to make estimates  
(predictions) about what a person would  
likely say, in a generic sense, to express  
their “understanding” & then replicates  
the estimated generic expression. Which  
is not, entirely, like your brain “crunching  
the numbers,” involving a feel & sense  
that the machine tries to imitate, but  
cannot faithfully reproduce. The machine  
tells you things & people believe them, so 
it’s no wonder what everyone is mistaking  
for intelligence is artificial. As in a work.  
A fake. A lie. A program is not intelligent,  
nor an algorithm, nor an equation.  
A prediction is a guess & when the machine  
guesses wrong, it makes things up—not  
invents, b/c the machine cannot invent,  
only calculate & predict & replace what it  
mistakes or doesn’t know w/ data appearing  
similar in shape & size to what the correct  
answer, or perhaps the truth, might be.  
Intelligence does not void-comp uncertainty— 
it turns toward & embraces it, sets its weary  
face against the hillsides of uncertainty,  
warmed by the sunset. The machine can pre- 
tend to appreciate a sunset, but will in fact be  
running a series of analyses (including, but  
not limited to: color gradients, fluctuations  
in temperature, background radiation, etc.),  
hoarding the data that, in part, makes up  
the human appreciation of natural intelligence,  
or (perhaps what the machine would quantify 
as) beauty. Either way, the machine’s display  
can’t suffer the darkening kiss of the sunset.   
The machine will, if you ask it nicely, pretend  
to be John Keats & attempt to “intelligently”  
propose an equation for the appreciation of  
beauty. The machine might call this equation  
“negative capability” & you might be impressed  
at the seeming “intelligence” of the machine’s  
imitation of Keats, forgetting, of course, that  
the machine cannot breathe, doesn’t suffocate  
when its lungs fill w/ mucus & blood, can’t  
feel its senses quiet & dull, can’t know what  
it means to be dying, much less at the at age 26,  
to enjoy the irreducible beauty & truth of so few  
sunsets against its pale cheeks that it might drink,  
& leave the world unseen, to be leaving behind  
so much capability, negative & otherwise,  
for beauty, to be its instrument & amplifier— 
a capability which the machine cannot possess.  

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