Pedagogy as Poetry

Where do I go when my fingers pause

on the keyboard, and I look up

from the screen to find the right words?

I’m still sitting in the chair, but I’ve gone

upstairs to the attic behind by eyes,

that metaphorical storehouse of cast-off

furnishings, old letters, cancelled checks,

curling photographs, tarnished ornaments

and board games missing tokens or play

money that’s everyone I’ve ever met and

everything I’ve ever thought or read or

been or felt or heard or seen.

I look out the window under the eaves

and I wait for words to materialize

which seems not the right verb for

objects without material form.

A larger language model than my brain

might find words faster

might write sentences better.

Since two heads are better than one,

An AI Hydra trained on trillions of

words coded as numbers, tokens, as

they are called, will perform better than

any human being, no?

Why should I even bother to write

when I can summon the ghosts of what’s

already been written? Why not always succumb

to the mystifying oracle of the AI miracle,

the Ouija board of data that runs on circuits,

not souls?

                                    Well…

While I am still able, I prefer to daydream

in the attic, to Bartleby the utilitarian

to give machine learned language predictions  

 my middle finger—”F- you!”

I prefer to wait in the uncertainty

of wet carbon corridors and trust

the biological connectors of this

aging convoluted mind-brain, also

trained on words (though not trillions) that for

better or worse, allows me to think of myself as I.

This is the brain that keeps me alive

that grows bolder as it strips off myelin sheaths

and though shrinking with age

still makes up the bed of the mind I lie in.

A mind given to rumination, perseveration

procrastination, prognostication, fantasy,

and at times even delusion up in the attic.

A mind that aspires to mindfulness and serenity

but will gladly give you a piece of itself if you vex me.

A mind that whether preoccupied or empty,

controlled or controlling, mastered or wasted,

at war or at peace with itself or somebody else

is quite simply mine.