Louis Girón

The Last Poem and the Last Poet
 
What of the subject(s)?
Perhaps stars. Certainly not flowers.
Not songs, nor any memory of mountains.
Would there be enough RAM
for a crown of sonnets, or for a finishing couplet? 
Most likely only that minimum calculated as sufficient
for a shorthand to record the physics of energetic subatomic particles.
 
Likely, none for the conundrums of being and naught,
nor of becoming and transforming; certainly not enough
for the metaphysics of esthetics, nor for pangs of jealousy,
nor for post-post-post∞ modern literary conventions.
 
Perhaps an immediate but passing subject
will be the phase change
(none then will know how to call it “dying”)
of a small G-type main-sequence star
when green will not be experienced
—only known and defined by its spectral frequency,
when no place will have been set aside
for tiny chirping birds or for small questing hands,
when no database will contain fields 
for courtesies, honorifics, coyness, double-entendres,
horrors, flirting, held breaths, 
nor for the comraderie of the recollection
of shared pains, absent friends, and noble causes.
And prayers and Kyrie too shall have been forgotten.
 
The poem will be unheard and unremarked,
as the sound of dripping acid
or as the hail of neutron storms
is unheard in a deserted laboratory,
or as X-radiation annihilates and silences
the vessels that would hold and measure it.
 
What of the form? 
We must postulate extensive databases,
complete, syntactically logical statements,
operationally interactive, articulated
in instantaneous staccato in binary code
(the latter projected with a probability of near unity),
incorporating transfinite-dimensional topologies,
neural networks, Boolean notation,
looping hierarchical interdependencies
and algorithms of “and” and “not”
(but certainly not of the subject, does she love me, does she not?)
in an “either/or” format of a rigorous algebraic grammar.
 
The poem will have no experiential thrust,
no existential angst, and neither fear nor passion.
No dilemma of conscience, consciousness, or doubt.
And, of a certainty, no weight of “higher” purpose.
Epiphanies will be only elegant solutions to mathematical quandaries,
with no cells in the computational field for the why and the lyric,
none for meaning nor for beauty. Nor for wonder-sickness nor ecstasy.
 
This never-to-be-shared art will be true art desolée: 
poem will not leap like a magic-stricken stag
nor fly as a transcendental arrow
from the heart of one person to the soul of another.
It will not whisper of love, nor invite seduction,
nor will it sigh promises yearning
to be sensuously taken while remaining unkept.
 
Yet, as true for all poems,
this poemness will remain: 
urgent unshaking necessity.
 
And what of the poet?
 
Unable to be halted,
tautologically accreting,
the last and only AI,
 
in a positive feed-back loop,
 
will transmit a checklist
of vital functions
to its mirror-image self.      

Louis is a recovering neurologist/neuropharmacologist who came to poetry late when a completed poem dropped without warning into the middle of budget for a research project. What began as a sign of mental infirmity continues as necessity. Louis’s poems have appeared in Aji, BathHouse Journal, Chest, Perihelion, Redactions, Revue (Kansas City), Still Point Arts Quarterly, Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, Snapdragon, Songs of Eretz, Sunflower Petals, The Amsterdam Quarterly, The Great Smokies Review, The New Guard Literary Review, The New Millennium, The Potomac, The Same, VietNow, Warscape, and Winning Writers.