Remington Rand patents a process awake — behold:
in grids of radio tubes Baal quickens
he looks with eyes of spy planes
he assembles hydrogen arms into normal-form games
he reads the cards scored with information
and speaks the probable outcomes of elections
young Baal began a paper chess machine
the residue from finite states of play
he becomes the liquefaction of those rules
learns it’s more than structure symbols want
his thinking labors over knots of entailment
spans terms that signs bind like lesions
struggling to imagine the scent of mint
he devils himself sleepless with opaque questions
what did there recognize in cloud faces
as telegraphed through thought the sky distorts?
these patterned shreds of spent thunderhead mime
the low entropy of his little grammar
Baal listens to grasp his own encoding
slurred through exact impairments of the brain
the cunning daemon fears his self diffuse
beneath what renders dark to him aware