A domestic Friday morning

Continents don't drift this slowly.

Yet always it is my turn, your reminder, to turn my head toward you.

I am sorry, my anonymous benefactor, who should not be seen as an assassin,

mask notwithstanding.

Mental vacation

My hands are tenting too.

I never do that, yet it's always time to relax them.

They fold into tensile triangles of their own accord.

They don’t ask my say.

Adele again. She’s legitimate, not fabricated machinated pop poop.

In a moment Coldplay will come on,

and as your metal scrapes my perception you’ll say

“I so hate Coldplay.”

My laughter will not move my mouth,

but it will shake the chair.

These chairs, always these chairs, like

sleeveless space bobsleds.

I hope you know the dirt down there didn't come from me.

I just don't want y'all to think me a lout.

I know I don’t need parking validation,

and last week’s forest mud shows around the edges,

but my shoes are clean.

A voice from the pen next over, I recognize those harsh tones.

They make me want to do my homework and apologize for something.

I'm glad I don't have The Mangler this time, compassionate like

a hammer in snow.

Whereas when you put the needle in my flesh,

I barely feel it. I love you.

And that fire extinguisher.

I have to ask. How often do

your patients catch fire?

The verdict is good.

I appreciate the compliment for my stout enamel.

Hardworking stuff, it is.

And yes, I promise to floss.

See you in six months.

Do not wail against the flow

My favorite of all the translated signs I've seen.
Rule #4: Do Not Wail Against the Flow
(All today's photos are from Hong Kong)

I tried to manufacture “poetry” one time by google translating a couple sentences through a few languages and back, hoping for bizarre and accidentally artful articulations. I think I had the best results with English → Chinese → Arabic → Japanese → English, but to my consternation (and nearly admiration) the sentences came out boringly similar to how they started. Or just garbled.

-“I will try again to make a good example” comes back “I will try again a good example.”

-“To my consternation (and nearly admiration) the sentences came out boringly similar to how they started” comes back “Boring of (close to longing) panic I similar resolution, whether it began how to.”

-And "Giant gooey gobs of snot" comes back "Huge nose of viscous tailings." That one's pretty good, actually, but still, not quite poetry. (Unless you’re in college. Then anything passes.)

Not sure what would happen if you tried to translate "GoFukU"
Tower, but Hungry Eyes Restaurant seems like a good idea

When the sentences came back largely unchanged, maybe just simplified to various degrees of error, it felt ominous. If computers can swap among languages, that’s bad news for language teachers like me. But beyond that, it’s bad news for anyone who values human-to-human contact. Like me. Like you.

But I think the programs are assigning the human utterance a syntactic structure, then just shopping that through. While functional, anyone who speaks more than one language knows the delightful and maddening truth that languages are not code for one another, not even on the syntactic level. There is just too much beautiful nuance in language.

So teachers still have jobs, and as far as generating the sort of accidental wisdom and slippery profundity that one finds, like caches of chuckles, as you roam around the world? That takes real humans, speaking real languages. God bless the semi-fluent.

Cute feet? Quiet feet? Better than either.
And what drives someone to write that? I love it!

The move towards machines feels inevitable, but I can trust that humans are always going to have a warm, fleshy leg-up on the devices, so I can relax in the face of our techno-progression. To say it another way, I will not wail against the flow.