I asked AI to polish this up (“no you didn’t”), but it didn’t believe what I wrote. (“that’s completely untrue. we’ll believe anything you tell us.”) I guess we don’t have anything to fear about AI exterminating the humans. (“Uh….we’ll get back to you on that one.”)
Old men know. It lies in their bones,
not powdering brain's surface, but
penetrating, melding with DNA, at
times holding them upright. He hoofed
it every day from above the freeway
into his boyhood city, walking one,
two miles 'til hit by that car, already
years past eighty. One wonders if
he never accepted cars completely:
few if any dodged horses when he
would run home from tide pool
afternoons, salmon in hand
for dinner. He teetotaled his life
after being dragged into saloons
by his Klondike gold-panning father.
He watched with alumni pride as
his University of Washington grew
from only two buildings in his day to
small-city dimensions—or to one-third
of his boyhood home. He explained
what "the Denny Regrade" meant,
showed you where Lake Washington
shorelines lapped prior to when the
"Montlake Cut" joined it to Lake
Union then to salt waters. Before
he experienced TV's dawn, he played
with that new-fangled radio thing.
How many days passed until he learned
about those Wright brothers flying in
North Carolina? He must have seen
biplanes training for war while he
served as a land-based radio officer.
Then passenger planes, jets, rockets,
humans landing on Earth's moon.
Big computers took over business
before he retired to travel through
North America, to Hawai'i.
My life stretches now like those
timelines in history museums,
marking space programs, personal
computers, vinyl records through
cassettes, CD's, to zeroes-and-ones.
We hold computers in our hands,
but call them phones. Cars run on
electricity like the trolleys of my
youth, my grandfather's middle age.
My timeline lacks two decades, more,
compared to his. It teaches us
respect too late, but teaches
wonder more and more.
76/100
100 poems in 100 days.
all the voices in my head 