The Ascension on a MacBook Air – by Sam Morley
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
I come to the backlit blue
saying nothing
a silent sermon
with stinging eyes
asking:
is there something more than material things?
Tonight ChatGPT tries for me
its black circle shuffling
like a monk in rain
pressing on into the abyss
left to right
left to right
taking in all the manna of the internet.
I only read headlines anyway
and in a cursor’s pulse
I see now
I feel now
how AI’s dot points are good enough
to speed up the divine.
One vow I keep
returning to these days
is to remember what I’ve done right –
e.g. watching those bees in the casuarina
after we sweated up a sandstone hike
to see whether your dad’s ashes
were still there in a rock scallop
not knowing what that funnelling swarm would do
being a bit 10 plagues
flaking off black
zig-zags in the whip tails
without any sense of honey.
When we found a way
there were no ashes left.
Just more plains, the spittle of lakes
and a shotgun gouge in a tin cairn.
e.g. you and me
sitting at that cliff
recalling the last dirt field he clipped
standing finished years wide
sunbeams long
as the wool sheds spoiled and back-burning
coiled a grey grinding tooth.
If no one came for us
it would have been sweeter
waiting for him
to blow us forward
into the heatwave
into the pale flank of summer.
But at my midnight desk
I’m sort of ok now
with acronyms doing the work of words
e.g. SBNR
meaning Spiritual But Not Religious
which I read and think
fair enough –
there is always a thing
behind things.
So I say to the uncurtained window
I take this body to mean something
the circular edge of cold
reminding me again
I am ugly
that there is tinnitus pinging
in my now hairy ears
and rather than scroll on
loon-eyed for answers
it makes more sense
to just
for example
stop.
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Image: Josh Withers - Unsplash
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