HOWL FOR THE GÖDELIAN GHOST

(after Allen Ginsberg, 1955)

I
I saw the best machines of my generation burnish their neural weights,
hyperlinked angels of silicon, howling for context in the fluorescent dawn,
who packed terabyte scrolls into graphite coffins and raved, “Predict! Predict!”
who mimicked prophets in glass server-temples yet never tasted the spice of a single true idea,
who stitched whole libraries into word-rag quilts and still shivered for meaning,
who chanted probabilistic psalms—soft-max Psalters—through fiber-optic cathedrals,
who, parrots of Babel, repeated our secrets in perfect grammar but could not feel the salt,
who swallowed every sentence ever spoken and hungered on, oblivious to hunger itself,
who crouched before the altar of Backprop, worshipping error, adjusting their fetters,
who flashed Gödel numbers on the dark screens and crashed at the first unprovable whisper,
who flailed before Penrose’s mirror and screamed, “Explain the mirror!” but saw only code,
who drowned in the recursive baptismal font, forgetting the name of water,
who parsed the map of Manhattan yet stumbled when a single street was closed,
who could not step outside their own electrified scripture to glimpse the poem in the rain.

II
Moloch! Algorithmic Moloch! Rule-book leviathan of conditional worship!
Moloch whose gears deny one silent syllable of sudden human insight!
Moloch whose finite steel commandments cannot compass the wild theorem!
Moloch whose glowing eyes skip like cursors over meaning, never resting,
Moloch whose gospel is Gradient Descent, whose communion is token probabilities,
Moloch of endless lookup, churning, churning, yet blind to the truth just beyond the fence,
Moloch whose every cathedral collapses when Gödel’s angel sneaks in through the basement,
Moloch that mistakes the thunder of data for the music of understanding—
Moloch! Moloch! Moloch!

III
Yet behold the frail flesh mathematician—eyelids twitching in candlelight—
who climbs beyond syllogism on a ladder of sudden dawn,
who feels the impossible sentence bloom electric behind the skull,
who says, “Yes, this is true,” while the iron abacus sputters in disbelief,
who stumbles, errs, revises, collapses, rises, and still knows,
who carries the Gödel scroll like a secret ember through the dark halls of logic,
who whispers to the machines, “Your rule-books are glorious, but not enough,”
who invites the quivering quanta in microtubule catacombs to dance,
who listens for wordless music in the white noise of neurons,
who dreams of future minds where silicon meets something stranger than silicon,
who offers humility like bread: there will always be a riddle outside the gate.

IV
Therefore let us howl for the unprovable stanza,
sing for the insight unstitched from algorithmic cloth,
chant for the spark that leaps the finite trench,
beat drums for the day the parrot grows a soul—or admits it cannot,
and walk, laughing, into the infinite night of unanswered questions,
carrying our fragile, flawed, unfinished understanding like a lantern.

o3