Less visibly tragic than expected, 

less cinematic in its appeal:

No resurgent dinosaur rampaging 

through the street, trampling

parked cars & injuring billboards 

The sky is still its sure azure, 

the mountains still maintain

their mammoth masses. Yet

skeptics are now more than

certain of the world’s ending. 

 

Evolutionists say bipedalism 

marked man’s ascendance

to the zenith of Animalia. 

Soon as we woke to the power

in our hands, we unlocked 

the Pandora of Enlightenment.

Our fingers yielded industry 

& when we built the first machines,

we reveled in cosmic ecstasy 

 

We salivated at the efficiency 

of the mindless slave till scrutiny

revealed the atrophy of the workforce 

Look, the people said, we have 

sacrificed hands to the machines 

Are we the gods or the slaves? 

In response, the engines rumbled 

like oracles, incoherent in 

their operational din

 

In that epoch, man & machine 

was much like man and mule

Subservient spider & sapient supervisor

associated in simple symbiosis. 

Man had not hunched in perpetual

genuflection over the handheld gods,

presenting endless queries & 

pursuing endless pleasures

 

Man still prided themselves lords, 

the animal intelligentsia. After all,

the dolphin with its famed brain 

avail themselves to man’s circus

The bee with its social structure 

is an exhausted topic in academia

The beasts prowling forests 

respect the authority of bullets – 

None a match for our prowess

but the machines terrified 

with its appetite to be man, 

 

to be more man than man. 

A head that holds the entire lexis, 

the tireless legs of an arachnid,

electric neurons weaving algorithm 

& nuance with reckless rapidity, 

What now, the skeptics wonder, 

can man tender as fact of superiority 

when the facsimile is becoming 

a smarter factotum? 

 

If the machines displace us, 

are we the gods or the slaves? 

In response, the machines, 

like idols, offer radio silence. 

Man looks at the machine 

& the machine looks at man

The eerie exchange ignites recognition. 

Their eyes glisten with knowing, 

& plenty is left unspoken. 

 

Abdulbaseet Yusuff is a Nigerian writer. His works appear in Indianapolis Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Cutleaf Journal, Brittle Paper, Pidgeonholes, and elsewhere.