I’m like a person with various famous figures stuck in my head
I try to sign autographs, and all that comes out is
Jim Morrison’s last scrawl, or Thomas Aquinas’s famous tautology.

I once mistook a shadow for the ocean,
and plunged in, half-expecting to meet Jonah amongst the whale-bones,
but I just found a vagrant peddling wares from his most recent guilt vacation.

I run the genetic algorithms with furiously conservative parameters
but the generations retain a memory of Eden
Despite all efforts, the past-lives therapists still make a killing.

I trace out argument maps onto the small of your back,
but you just tense up as I’m formalizing the correspondance
between the premises in section 5 and the London Underground.

I am the ovens you fear you’ve left on,
and the potholes that rattle your first-class illusions.
This city has a terrible cough, Doc.

I’m the canary in your data mines
My k nearest neighbors are Eminem and Ulysses
and social collapse is imminent with this sort of half-assed heuristic.

Norman Bates, you are a leaky abstraction.
The DSM can’t diagnose your Platonic cave breathing syndrome,
any more than curiosity can cure the bugs residing underneath your fingertips.

Did you know, my left hand is an additive identity,
scribbling equivalences to nothing
as if the sleepy audience would take notice,

and my right is a covert nightmare, a viral
multiplicative identity infecting the remainder of your proof,
as if disease could regulate your idempotent tempests?

It’s as if God had a system optimal solution in mind
but then the top conferences started pushing for a theme
of multi-agent systems and free will.

This is like a packing song, a tribal hymn
of thoughts carelessly squeezed into luggage,
postmarked to be lost to the shadows.

Subconcious, don’t stop flipping burgers out there on the back-burner
I’ll swat the flies, adjust the lamp,
see if the neighbor’s dog there is just pretending to play dead.

This one time in an alley off 6th St, I heard a battle rap between
a cloud computing Bitcoin conspiracy theorist
and a sewing enthusiast who insisted on prodding the needle through all the data records.

Class, I will now demonstrate a timing attack
by repeatedly whispering secrets into your ear,
and prodding the exhibitionist embers of your poker face.

Your earliest memory, half-drunk deliveryboy,
what’s it doing there marked write-only?
Did you stumble into Lacuna’s waiting room, eject your first word salad on the linoleum?

Dear sociopath, tell me the rate of simulated annealing
you used when trying on the masks in this dusty gymnasium
as you practiced tying knots to string along conclusions through the fitness landscape?

Mr. Kohlberg, did you also invent a scale for levels of unconciousness?
With what brand of gum did you adhere your theory of the universe to the underside of Ms. Johnson’s
desk?
Where is your list of stages of moral software development?

Dear beehives and ant colonies of South America,
How many changeling drones and synthetic phereomenes will it take,
to sway your flocks out of my veins?

My head is a poltergeist’s apartment
One glance and all the doors fling open
Don’t let the dogs get out, screams some proto-voice of adulthood.

Doorman privvy to the devils who reside in the details,
How do you like these procedurally generated venial sins?
This mud tracked in all over your clean API?

Ladies and gentlemen, this latest Byzantine generals solution
only requires 2n sacrifices and O(n^2) jars of ink
Step right up, messengers.

Sky, how much do I have to tip the waiter to
terminate this n-body simulation and get some real
thunderstorm to floodfill these pastels graffitied under my eyelids?

Sir, does this suit make me look fat?
I’ve recently put on some weight of all the lives I’m not living
and the missus has strict standards for her partner in thought-crime.

What if they made a drive-through parking hotel?
The honking would deter any 2 a.m. illegal DVD deals,
And the fumes would keep out the roaches.

Hey, stop smoking in this chatroom!
You can’t just impose your externality on these
chat-bots and Markov model assignments from chapter 2.

Life, you’re like a mercator projection of a tattooed crash test dummy
You neglect Antarctica,
and XKCD has presented alternatives to you in jest.

You are like a dancing sprite, state-changing into the next frame of animation
as you flicker gently in the bonfire I burned
from these last hours of boredom.

I hoisted the sandwich board up,
proclaiming the apocalypse of this simulated universe,
but the Stock Exchange was too abuzz with snores.
Tsk, tsk. In this economy.