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.