Gods in Our Pockets Poem, by gray0328, at My poetic side

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?

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