Wednesday, July 11, 2018

The Penalty for Being Wrong

That quick flick of hair … is a piece of the whole,
Each off-the-grid urge intrinsic to the thought.
Wanted: Mistakes, Perversions, Lies,
Perspectives that cancel each other out,
Oooh, those especially.

The God of large numbers uses them all
In his blindingly full calculations.

How can a mere singular know
What problem it resolves
Or what multiples it factors,
How it can be substituted or subtracted,
Or if it’s imaginary, virtual, abstract?

Our job is to fix things, His to spit on our fixes
As a cloud of polynomials spill out stochastic haze.

But a compiler of weights sits behind it …

We can stand for ourselves,
Or be different from what we represent,
And the formulas will reduce and adjust
And we’ll have made it all different somehow,
Though the code is so vast it’s impenetrable,
And the directive to calculate continues unabated,
Everything on every side systematically cancelled out.