longer.blue

~ The thing about my My electronic puppet Two bit sclerosis ~ This compact haiku stages a quietly devastating meditation on the gap between thought and expression — and the tools we reach for when language fails us. The opening line, "The thing about my," arrests itself mid-thought, performing its own argument before it has even begun. The trailing incompleteness is not careless; it is precise. It enacts the very failure of articulation the poem laments — the thought exists, whole and urgent, somewhere behind the words, but the words refuse to arrive. The repetition of 𝘮𝘺 across the line break deepens this: possession is asserted twice, as though the speaker is gripping something that keeps slipping. What is 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘦 exactly? The thought? The illness? The machine? The "electronic puppet" enters as a would-be solution — an AI, a prosthetic voice, a tool the poet manipulates to give shape to what biology and neurology increasingly obscure. Yet the metaphor of puppetry cuts both ways. The poet pulls the strings, yes, but the puppet can only mime. It cannot 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯 with the same depth, the same embodied urgency, that the poet intends. The tool clarifies, but it also flattens. The final image, "two bit sclerosis," is the poem's brilliant hinge. It fuses the neurological — the hardening, the lesions, the misfiring signals of multiple sclerosis — with the binary logic of digital computing, where everything resolves into on or off, one or zero. But human thought refuses that reduction. Meaning is not binary. Nuance is not a switch. The crossing of signals — between neurons, between poet and machine, between speaker and reader — produces not clarity but interference. What the poem ultimately mourns is the irreducible loss in translation: from mind to body to machine to language to another mind. Each crossing costs something, something invaluable. ~ This observation was made with the assistance of claude.ai. ~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To support me, visit: https://tinyurl.com/andy-rukes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~