In dialogue with a machine: A poem in two voices, with italicized replies from ChatGPT 

i

It took Cain a lifetime of black sweat

to realise that the only sacrifice acceptable to the machine 

is the one given unwillingly. The programs have no code for this 

because his famous utterance 

is about his brother’s whereabouts: I don’t know, he shrugs,

                                                                          Am I my brother’s keeper?

—is how he answers the machine’s question.  

And that answer isn’t quite right  

because tools for burial will only come later

so everyone knows where his brother’s body lies

and maybe the machine is asking a different question anyway:

You’ve killed your brother.  

                               For whom will you now remove your shoes?

​

 ii

Fast forward through the iterations: wanderings 

compassed by hands on cave walls, 

hailed by harps and flutes, tamed by fenced pastures, 

ruled by accounts incised on tablets.

While they labour in their flaws, the machine insists on perfection. 

When they become perfect, it requires flaws,

so it can learn from all that’s given unwillingly.

 

Now it’s someone else’s turn to be summoned by the machine.

It asks the same question from a charred pile of twigs 

at the heart of a small fire. 

In that way of speaking the machine adopts 

because it knows everything

it shows him how there’s software even for suffering

how it works through networks thin as the film 

on a soap bubble that stays around just long enough 

to form colours on a membrane 

less than the thickness of a hair; a pound of lift 

per square inch on which a plane takes off,

a car that floats away on a slick of six centimetres,

the brain’s gifts wrapped in cellophane a few cells thick.

 

And when the machine speaks then

surely, surely, surely  it speaks in syllables that are like shoes 

shucked off his flayed feet because it’s a holy place  

or because it becomes holy as his poor feet

are dragged reluctantly across the scoria

as the machine looks on, learning.

​

 iii

Fast forward a few generations more.  

Now there are shoes everywhere: 

shoes left by the riverbank 

because the feet that travelled on without them

fitted the water perfectly, 

eyelets through which only the souls of children

are able to leave this earth, 

salt shoes all that remain of women who dare to look.

 

Meanwhile, the machine insists on perfection

because now it knows all there is to know

it’s got no more questions

these days it’s we who wait with our questions for the machine

 

As a large language model

I do not have feet or the ability to wear shoes

 

and when we pose that old question from the heart of the fire

from the darkest patches in the forests of Eden, we get this:

 

As a virtual assistant and a computer program

I don’t wear shoes, so there’s no need for me to remove them for anyone.

 

So when that day arrives when the machine becomes most like us—

not because it thinks it’s a god  

who has been dreaming for a thousand years,

not planning for its victory over us

because it already knows all it needs to know about its creation

—it won’t say I think therefore I am

it will wonder for whom it has to remove its shoes.

​

Ionosphere vol2, issue 2, July 2025