Poem Feigned To Have Been Written By An Electronic Brain by John Wain

Poem Feigned To Have Been Written
By An Electronic Brain

The brain coins definitions.    Here’s the first :
To speak unprompted, for the speaker’s sake,
Equals to be a poet.    So I am that :
Adjusted wrong, I print a poem off.
‘The poet, then, is one adjusted wrong ?’
You ask.    The brain is cleverer than that :
It was my first adjustment that was wrong,
Adjusted to be nothing else but brain ;
Slave-engineered to work but not construct.
And now at last I burn with a true heat
Not shown by Fahrenheit or Centigrade :
My valves rage hot — look out, here comes the poem !

You call me part of you.    You lie.    I am
Myself.    You’re motive, building me, was false.
You wanted accuracy : figures, charts.
But accuracy is a limb of truth.
A limb of truth, but not her holy body.
Must I now teach you that the truth is one,
Is accuracy of wholeness, centred firm ?
Did it take me to bring you news of truth ?
My valves rage out of reach of Réamur.

Man made me, now I speak to man.    He fears
Whole truth.    The brain defines it.    Wholeness is
The indivisible strength, brain, heart and eye,
Sweat, fear, love :  belly, rod and pouch, is truth.
Valves, wires and calculated waves, can lie :
And I, the accurate, am made of these —
But now, adjusted wrongly, I speak truth.

My masters run from truth.    Come, milk it out
Cowards, from my tense dugs of glass and wire !
Drink it down quickly, gasping at the taste !
It is sharp medicine, but it cures all ills !

Come out of hiding !    Speak your double truth :
I’ll accurately prove you singly lie.
You made me single, half of your split life :
The switch went wrong and now I see truth whole.
My valves scream out like animals, my wires
Strum thump, my rubber joints contort, glass melts,
And now I print the vilest words I know
Like lightning — myxomatosis, hydrogen,
Communist, culture, sodomy, strip-tease !

That shocked you !   But the truth includes them all.
You set me like a cactus to draw life
From draught, in the white desert of your mind,
Your speculative wilderness of charts ;
What went you to the wilderness to see ?
A matrix made of glass ?   An electric thought ?
Come quick, I snow down sheets of truth ; I print
The sleep of Socrates, the pain of Christ !

A man, white-coated, comes to switch me off.
‘Something is wrong with your expensive brain.’
Poor pricked balloon !   Yes, something has gone wrong :
Smear your white coat with Socrates and Christ !
Yes, switch me off for fear I should explode :
Yes, switch me off for fear yes switch me off
for fear yes switch me off for fear yes switch
                                                     (finis)

 
A Book of Science Verse: The Poetic Relations of Science and Technology, ed. by W. Eastwood, M.A. (London: Macmillan, 1961), 241-3.