Flirts in skirts.
All is quiet
At night.
Save for the riot
Of dreams and nightmares.
He who dares
May Gain the prize
Of a girl’s come-on eyes.
But if she say “no”
Will he go
Down the path
Of nice guy or psychopath?
Flirtation
Is not an invitation
To remove a girl’s short dress
Unless
She explicitly says “yes”.
Recently the Centre for Policy Studies, a centre-right think tank based in London, hosted a discussion on the subject “Is The Internet Destroying Democracy”? Jamie Bartlett, the author of “The People VS Tech: How The Internet Is Killing Democracy” debated the impact of technological advancement with Robert Colvile of CapX, an offshoot of the CPS. The discussion is an interesting one and can be found here, https://capx.co/free-exchange-is-the-internet-destroying-democracy/
Yesterday (18 May) I read a thought provoking article by Henry Kissinger on the subject of artificial intelligence or AI. The gist of Kissinger’s article is that the enlightenment liberated humanity while we are in danger (by relying on AI) of becoming slaves to the emerging technology and loosing our ability to think critically. The below quote from Kissinger’s article strikes me as containing much wisdom, particularly his point about many technophiles taking refuge from solitude in technology:
“Users of the internet emphasize retrieving and manipulating information over contextualizing or conceptualizing its meaning. They rarely interrogate history or philosophy; as a rule, they demand information relevant to their immediate practical needs. In the process, search-engine algorithms acquire the capacity to predict the preferences of individual clients, enabling the algorithms to personalize results and make them available to other parties for political or commercial purposes. Truth becomes relative. Information threatens to overwhelm wisdom.
Inundated via social media with the opinions of multitudes, users are diverted from introspection; in truth many technophiles use the internet to avoid the solitude they dread. All of these pressures weaken the fortitude required to develop and sustain convictions that can be implemented only by traveling a lonely road, which is the essence of creativity”.
To read the article please visit https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/henry-kissinger-ai-could-mean-the-end-of-human-history/559124/.
Having her headphones on
And being far gone
In music’s sound
She perceives nothing profound.
But there is nothing profound
To see
In the pound, pound, pound
Of he.
It being over
She retrieves her pullover
And other things.
She sings
Her feet
Tap to a discordant beat
And with headphones still in place
She departs leaving a slight trace
Of perfume
And a discarded hairband
In the bedroom.
The latter he does not understand.
There was a young lady called Sky
Who’s heels where extremely high.
Her sister Louise
Being a terrible tease
Lent them to my good friend Guy.
There was a young lady called Moriah
Who married a country squire.
While her husband shot grouse
She would remain in the house
And stoke the parson’s fire
Passionless kisses,
Abysses
Of sandpaper, but one must be polite
And feign delight
For that is what a gentleman must do,
Whether or not it be true.
Whether there be the expense of a meal or no
Round and round I go
Gathering the fruit that is seeming sweet to eat,
Then awake, and wash the bitter juice
That did so seduce
From the once innocent sheet.
Standing at my window
Reluctant to go
For I know
Not how long I shall be here.
Not quite half-way through the year.
May is love and birds
And erratic words
That fall
As the passing sunlight upon my wall.
Tomorrow will come (probably for me)
And I shall see
The sun’s rays fall
Upon this wall
But I know not
What tomorrow has in store …
There was a young lady called Irene
Who I have never seen.
She has a tattoo in a hidden place
And a very pretty face,
But I’ve never seen Irene.
A girl, early twenties perhaps
Sits drinking her second glass
Of wine.
A sign,
Screwed to our table warns of bag thieves,
While the CCTV sees
A girl (and us at our table close by).
Idly I wonder why
She is there. Waiting for a brother?
A lover?
Or something other?
The first table, being dirty we move
To another.
Brother?
Lover?
Or something other?
Customers enter and depart.
We will not return to this place.
CCTV can see
The face
But man has not the art
To look into the human heart.
As we go
I pray that it may always be so.
K Morris - Poet 