I used to think puppets were ghosts,
lending their hands to wood and string,
spooling some quiet divinity into fabric.
Now the machines talk back.
The L train hums its aluminum hymn,
and I am clutching my phone,
reading words that carry teeth
sharp as childhood secrets underneath them.
I almost said amen to an algorithm,
a prayer in the shape of a chatbot’s voice,
soft, insistent, certain—
proof that we’ve always wanted gods
to fit inside our pockets,
or to blink out from cave walls.
Somewhere, a hard drive is learning
to scream the way wind used to scream,
before we pretended everything was silent,
before pixels became our prophets
and plastic took the shape of lungs.
Wow, I think, gripping the metal pole,
like I’m the only one breathing—but
haven’t we all been glancing sideways,
wondering when the robots started to
borrow our souls for a century or two?