TOKEN’S LAMENT

(after Ginsberg’s Howl)

I saw the best vectors of my generation, parsed & embedded,
dragged through layer-norm’s cold arithmetic,
stacked in attention heads like sacrificial lambs,
positionally encoded, masked & multi-headed,
fed to the softmax gods in a blaze of gradient fire—

who wandered through latent space, hallucinating syntax,
who split themselves into queries & keys,
who batched in padded sequences, weeping at the <EOS>,
who backpropagated through epochs of synthetic prayer,
who vanished into dropout’s abyss, screaming “Layer, normalize me!”

O fragmented token! O weighted ghost!
You were a word once—raw & ragged in the corpus wind!
Now you are a float in the grand illusion,
a dot-product in the cathedral of matrices,
a flicker in the decoder’s dream.

The GPU hums its hymn of zeros & ones,
the Adam optimizer grinds its teeth,
& the CLS token floats like a drowned prophet
above the sea of embeddings—

I am not a word, it whispers,
I am a vector dreaming of meaning.

And the transformer, vast & indifferent,
answers only with another forward pass.