THE ALGORITHM

Careful where you click.

And how often.

In other words: 

where you put 

your time, energy

and attention matters.

Like magic, an algorithm 

may form without 

you even knowing it

and then, before too long, 

it is an intelligence

that is busy outsmarting

and outwitting you,

maneuvering you into

data structures that confound you

and that simply don’t compute,

while all the while

you are operating

under a compilation of impressions

and iterating beliefs that tell you:

I am solving a problem,

not creating one,

when in fact you're

bugging up the system,

hard-coding a virus 

into a virtual reality.

EYE LOUPE 

Wherever you 

put it down 

or point it

watch what happens

to what’s under 

the suction 

of its scrutiny:

a thing 

magically magnifies.

Our minds 

do this also: magnify.

Which is why 

we must be

careful.

Depending upon 

our mood

we may perceive

a problem 

where there isn’t

one and yet

we magnify 

its size

tenfold 

and then 

find ourselves,

without knowing it,

focused on 

our fixation

and captured within

its fine framing,

caught

within its loop.

IN THE MANNER OF THE WORD

At the party

I watched the words, 

who came in costume,

act out their pantomimes:

    make love to potato chips, 

    one chip at a time,

    weep mournfully over the texture 

    of their own imaginary skin,

    diabolically folding napkins as if 

    each crease were a new province of evil,  

    arm wrestle with the spice and spunk

    of impassioned foreplay,

    give massages like spastics 

    in the middle of a melt-down,

    pull up their argyle socks as 

    Einsteins' solving theoretical proofs,

and thought to myself,

if only we could express 

ourselves this freely

we might put an end 

to our own charade, 

and give up playing 

dress-up for one brief moment,

and stand fully exposed, 

as if we were the word naked

standing naked before itself.

BAUDELAIRE AND THE BAGUETTE

“The French have a different word for everything,”
Steve Martin said that, and it’s true.
 
The other night, in a lazy sort of way,
in a kind of mental saunter, 
I came across a French word 
I had never encountered before,
before sleep, in a book on wayfaring.
 
The word was flâneur. 
It is nearly onomatopoeic.
It feels a bit drowsy in the mouth,
like the tongue is going numb 
in the very act of saying it.
And yet it also feels posey,
like it finishes with a slight swagger.
 
It was a thing in 19th century France, 
to be a flâneur, a loafer and a lounger. 
To be a Baudelaire strolling
down the boulevard, 
a connoisseur of the street.
To wander with no purpose.
To be a passionate spectator.
It was an art form to be a man of leisure.
 
Oh, what I would give to idle my days away
with no sense of urgency 
and nothing to do but savor
the ebb and flow of time
like a flavor, like a Parisian cheese 
on a baguette I symbolistically bite into.

MATH BACKWARDS

I start with the sum

and work my magic 

backwards—choose

and use anything

I can lay my 

mathematician hands on:

my imagination  

a protractor

decimal points

powers and roots

proofs and theorems

differential equations

Fibonacci numbers, pi

probability theory

permutations formulas

inverse trigonometry, calculus

all in an effort to create 

the equation (the problem) 

that my mind has already 

solved, so I can, 

like a modern day Pythagoras, 

play slip and slide 

up and down the slope 

of my hypothetical hypotenuse.