Atheist is a garish word,
Glaring and harsh. I am
Not faithless; I find faith in
Oneness, though not “ONE TRUE GOD,”
Setting up the pieces like a
Toy train, a remote switch railmaster.
I find faith in inscape: interrelations and
Correlations between the many that are One.
— Stace Johnson, 1992
To Keats
That I, an unknown poet at the best,
Would feel so strong the pull of Imagery
To scribble out these lines before I rest
‘Pon reading of your life and poesy
Seems strange. I’ve often felt a gossamer
Connection to your life — invisible
The cords that bind two Menschen einsamer
Are chords in vacuum played, inaudible.
Your life cut short when you were twenty-six
The ripe old age at which I pen these lines
Your language rich with metaphors and tricks
A quantum leap above these scrawls of mine.
Tonight, I wished that I could cease to be,
But Keats restored my faith with poetry.
— Stace Johnson, 1991
The NeXT Step?
(Vorticism 1991)
Thousands of programmers
Typing in unison
Hacking in UNIX on
Sleek black machines.
Weizenbaum warns us that
AI’s not where its at
Threats to humanity
Garnish the seams
Of these C algorithms
And LISP subroutines.
Icons to silicon
Bury our dreams.
Massively parallel
Spells analog’s death knell;
Hypercubes emulate
Turing machines
In a giant array
of AI DNA,
Launching electrons like
Silical genes.
Cognitive science has
Taught us to ask ourselves:
When does Intelligence
Make its own means?
Sufficiently complex
Parallel neural nets
Attain self-awareness at
Some point, it seems;
What right as Creators
Have we to berate or
Suppress the inception of
Silicon Dreams?
— Stace Johnson, 1991
In G
"Blues for Alice"
Embossed in black vinyl;
Alto sax half-tones
Determinedly driven from
Grooves in a gyre.
In F
All the cats
Danced in the aisles
Grooving on jazz when
Charlie "Bird" Parker
Flew his horn.
In C
Each sizzling seventh
Axed through the ages,
Demanding an audience.
Gone, now, resolved in the
Circle of Fourths.
— Stace Johnson, 1988
Two Shifts Passing in the Nightshecomeson a cyan-tailedcomet, bareback braving thesolar wind as you wet your lips andshe passes too close, dancing and dopplingthrough your star-dappled daydreams, anunearthly equestrian on ared-tufted stallionleavingyou |
— Stace Johnson, 1988