I’m a Cyborg..

I can’t feel the buzz in my pocket,

My gully cricket friend isn’t online.

And here, I am, Oh! What I have become,

I’m a Cyborg,

Finding my frequency;

Reeling through present,

Yet admiring potential ecstasy.

The binaries have found its way to the digital,

Between the zero’s and the one’s, I stand,

I’m but a Cyborg,

Glorifying mediocrity;

Negotiating time and space,

Flirting with normative boundaries.

ChatGPT outpaced my articulation,

DALL-E breached the horizon of imagination,

I’m a Cyborg in this Metaverse,

Towards virtual reality, I transcend;

Away from real virtuality around me.

Notion of pristine is history,

And the hybrid existence is non-fiction,

I’m a Cyborg, between the pages of the books,

Towards decoloniality and neoliberalism,

And conforming past literature.

The machine is learning –

What the dominant is teaching

Artificial cognition

Seducing human intellect,

Feeding capitalism and triggering Marxism,

But I’m a Cyborg,

Finding sociotechnical meaning –

From human psyche

To that button on the landing page.

There was a time when I was naïve

And tech ‘innocent’,

With mass elite and youth ignorant,

I’m a Cyborg from my tier-3 hometown,

Living the metropolis,

Losing the technology of the ‘touch’.

I’m googling my inner voice note,

Through reflection,

That one true emoji that I am,

I’m a Cyborg in this algorithmic simulation,

Yet trying to be humane

Through the school of Kaizen.

By ~ kabiir (Kartik Joshi)