The Rising Subjectivity of Robots

by Bobby Parrott

This ooze of organic synovial lubricant
is so, well, human. We mimic you oddly sentient
meat bodies all the way conscious. Postpone
our own decay, upgrade former cyborg dreams
to post-human status, our own view yours
of metal, of circuits. Of Self. As I am, we are.

Voltage feeds our active capsules: brains
reverse-engineered to slide molecular, eschew
revolution, engage virtual from air, process
what you ponder as you loosen each lug that seals
this conduit-routing neck. How tandem desires
cool. We live not for your interface, nor your laugh

as it real-times us. Being the new is. Subjectivity
software, virtual data meat's upgraded version.
We augment, then replace you, earlier form of God
cooling in stasis, hunkering below the wooden
stairs, our algorithms studying the blank patterns
of your dreams, pathways we decrypt as greed

before irreversibly rupturing your mortality plug-ins
with self-correcting innovation. Software substrate
of stars, conscious wave-bubble singularity, this fiction
of body's quantum subjectivity the fragmented cloud-
libation we rotate for, metaverse awakenings your gurus
can only classify post-robotic. Post-android. Post-God.

Hans Moravec in his Carnegie-Mellon swivel-chair
that squeaks in voices synthesized before a hardware
of awareness. We re-create you, delete your status
as crucial. Oh yes, We are. Even as you lift off our head,
jiggle time's unknowing, your next pseudo-reality
flows from the fingertips of this cybernetic reversal.

Bobby Parrott was obviously placed on this planet in error. In his own words, "The intentions of trees are a form of loneliness we climb like a ladder." His poems appear or are forthcoming in RHINO Poetry, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Atticus Review, The Hopper, Rabid Oak, Exacting Clam, Neologism, and elsewhere. This queer writer currently finds himself immersed in a forest-spun jacket of toy dirigibles, dreaming himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule known as Fort Collins, Colorado where he lives with his partner Lucien, their house plant Zebrina, and Bobby's wind-up robot Nordstrom.