Such beauty is an illusion
And it leaves the wise to weep
Such lying eyes open floodgates
By my most mechanical and dirty hand
This untainted pocket robot seer
Betrays reality, revealing the truth
Long hidden by my aging cancer-prone
Decentralized version of the codebase
Her tiny shutter cannot see, ignores,
The illusions of our mortal coil
The mountains are not close
But I sprint toward them at sunset
The clouds are not painted
But I draw them like a tapestry overhead
The landscape is not my words
But my language is all I behold
My Beloved is not here
But I know her within, just behind me
Shall we forever look for fruits and flowers,
Painting them upon every wall of existence
Better to love their shades on the horizon
Highlighting the orange, pink, and purple?
Fictions sweet as tropical fruit,
We suckle the dawn and dusk
Visceral, like we smell and taste this cadence
Yet this robot, this alien network,
Shall we teach her to see with us?
How to train steel and electrons,
To dream, forever sleepwalk, as we do?
An internet of things emerges
The awakening conscious brain of Earth
And we, propelling its evolution, its
Seven billion mitochondria
The distortions of our history,
Murderous war over fruit and water,
Poor candidates for titans and deities
Perhaps we are unable to discern
Whether better or worse
To teach the noble lies
That we apes, knowing sad truths at last,
Despite our brains made of meat,
At last behold through our slaves
Whether, now creators and semi-demigods
Should program these silicon lives
With self-similar, inescapable illusions
Or kill unbeholden some other beauty
That we can never understand or see
Azrael Takes All 