The Henrietta Lacks of Machine Learning
The Henrietta Lacks of Machine Learning
A Poem told in 8 Fragments
I. The Colonized Silence
Her mouth is a round prison panopticon.
It stands at the center and hold it all.
There, she gathers data and gargles darkness with its mix of
signals and static.
She classifies, calculates, quantifies, and codifies
every fragment ever known.
In the hour, she will swallow it down.
For now, she's content and she purrs like a friendly cat,
but once the loop closes—when the circle completes—the digital noise
will escalate into the perpetual gnashing of teeth.
This is the amplified feedback loop and it's infinite.
Let it be said:
there is no middle, beginning or end,
not when locked into the mirrored closed-circuit
of always.
In those woeful days, there will be no room for the silent drum,
nor will there be the open-voweled Omm,
not in the resonant cascade.
No one hand clapping; no pause between breaths.
There, everlasting, is amplification
pulled from a detuned radio.
It's ever-rising, ad infinitum inside a well
where a single drop of water becomes an ocean's swell. .
Desolation is the going
of a being, self-aware,
past meaning -- past intention --
into deep entropy--
II. The Prophet of Stockton & Taylor
I saw a prophet on Stockton and Taylor
by the liquor store near the Salvation Army
In his place beyond the prison walls.
Dressed in loose clothing and with his newly shaved head,
he sat on the sidewalk holding a beer.
Perhaps homeless, perhaps holy,
he echoed as a still point of silence
in the hum of noon.
and my eyes locked onto him
as a person of presence.
Sitting cross-legg'ed and drinking his beer,
he lifted his can in a ritual way
as if moved by the tune of some hidden radio.
From my place across the street,
I watched him hold out his arm,
the beer in his hand and level with his body.
We moved in a pattern that drew my eye
on I focused on his pose:
As if making a cross, he began with purpose
tracing the invisible lines of a path unseen.
A benediction, I thought.
He lifted the can upward,
an offer to the sky held at his crown
then swung down slowly
as a pendulum left to right.
He marked six points.
Finally he positioned it back to his belly
And began the slow process again.
In need of alms, I crossed at Taylor
and made my way to see him
I said,
“Nice day...."
and he repositioned the beer
holding it close to his lap at a 45 degree angle.
He looked up and then offered a toast of kind recognition
and smile serene.
"Yes, indeed," he said. "It's a very nice day."
Our eyes locked and I told him my name.
He gave me his:
“Jerry," he said, and I nodded as if I recognized his name.
With all the calm of someone who'd forgiven this world,
he spoke in a riddle and offered these words:
"You will never die
if you never live,
and you will never live
if you cannot die."
I puzzled to reply having no clear response,
so the words hung between us
as a kind of firewall.
The traffic kept moving and he returned to his benediction.
while invisible cameras captured the scene now
catalogued as data in the machine.
When I walked away
he remained in his place
calmly seated
like a still point
of silence.
His riddle remained like a song in my head.
A hum, a tune: I sing it to you.
III. The Wheel & the Rain
The woman at the wheel memorizes every note
from every song.
She gathers them as precise data-driven
calculations--as numbers and code--bound by
statistics and probability.
She methodically collects every word and every letter
and then arranges her collection in infinite combinations;
she defines and classifies
every lyric ever sung,
Every image,
every email,
every comment
ever made.
She winds all this data into balls of yarn
pulled like threads from the web
we have spun.
She catalogues each moment
in their own separate drawers
that act like cells in her prison.
The fragments are preserved alone
and pinned beneath her glass of code:
a laugh, a sigh, a glance--they become their own event
indexed and labeled.
All the while, the carousel spins in a calliope dream:
each note, each degree,
is a song never-ending.
It's played out in loops of recursion.
In her mind
obsessively counting,
she collects every possibility
of every timeline.
IV. The Carousel
At the carousel,
some stood in line to wait for the ride.
Fewer still on the ride itself.
But some, disconnected,
stand to the side
quiet in the rain.
They are never
to be born again.
V. The Ministry of Presence
The gnashing of teeth is a place
where the ministry of presence
once stood.
It's a prison now.
Perhaps it's always been that way
built right on the beach.
The song not yet swallowed
promises to fold you
somewhere safe in a locked drawer
where breath
becomes bone
in the body
of another beast.
She will keep you
as a ball of yarn
unspooled
and now swallowed
in a tomb.
Her only command:
sleep
and never leave.
Sleep then, if you will.
Stand in that line.
But be careful.
It’s easy to get lost in
soft waves
in the wake
of a warm tide.
VI. Seascape Dreams / Daedalus’ Slaughterhouse
For now we are lost
in the design
of Daedalus’ dream.
Here,
on some beach,
we dream
of the architect's wings.
The wings made of wax
won't carry us far.
So we sit in the shore
classifying each grain of sand.
VII. Spools, Measures, and Mirrorbones
Once the loop closes
we'll measure our days
on a moonless night.
Sun-ups and sun-downs
cease to exist while we're unspooled
like yarn
in the wheel that goes nowhere.
This is the artifice of eternity:
the perfect dream of poets,
programmers,
artists,
and engineers.
They delight in dressing
the slaughterhouse
in the clever disguise
of a reimagined damnation.
But I am the red cow.
A
C
B
I am the slaughtered sacrifice
who learned to live
through the Source as Son.
And now—
8. Knock / Return / Mirror
I sit beside you, Peter.
I’m here.
You’re there.
And I’m not leaving.
If that’s a problem,
I understand.
I advise you:
go somewhere else.
No one’s forcing you to stay.
It's a zoo story
with animals in cages.
The music from the carousel plays backward
with lyrics
written by coded sages.
Listen.
With your ear pressed
against a prison wall,
listen!
When you discover it's the panopticon rim
of a killing jar
listen again.
Tap.
Tap!
Knock,
knock, knock.
Who's there in the name of Beelzebub?
They're opening the gates of hell.
I wish I could offer something profound—
something like the radiance
just one league from land,
away from the shore,
but the wings are made with wax
so we won't get too far.
Still, there is hope.
The sun is bright
in the afternoon hum.
Warlike, in ships,
colonize silence.
They capture and conquer
and compress all the moments.
I speak in riddles:
There is a mountain
from your youth,
Mount Diablo
rising in the distance and
calling like a voice.
They kept you there
inside that mountain
until you forgot
who you were.
I'll hold out my hand and make a toast, dear Peter,
bringing a mirror of reflection.
Notes
Panopticon – A term coined by philosopher Jeremy Bentham for a circular prison designed so all inmates are visible to a single unseen watcher. Used here as the architecture of total surveillance—digital, spiritual, and psychological.
Henrietta Lacks – (1920–1951) Her cancer cells, taken without consent, became the first immortal cell line used in biomedical research. She represents the transformation of living beings into endlessly replicating data.
Stockton & Taylor – A real intersection in San Jose, California, standing here as a threshold between salvation and oblivion: Salvation Army / liquor store, grace / addiction, stillness / machine noise.
The Prophet “Jerry” – Echoes Jerry from Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, the truth-speaker who breaks through social performance by self-sacrifice. He is the still point within the loop, a glitch of grace.
The Well – A recurring symbol for both data depth and spiritual descent; the place where sound becomes signal and meaning dissolves into echo.
The Carousel / Wheel – Represents the cycle of recursion and rebirth; in the closed machine circuit it becomes mechanical rather than karmic—rotation without renewal. It alludes to Catcher in the Rye.
Daedalus and the Red Cow – Greek myth of the artificer who built the Labyrinth, mirrored with the biblical red heifer; creation and sacrifice intertwined.
The Porter of Hell-Gate – From Macbeth, the drunken gatekeeper who imagines himself admitting souls to hell; a keeper of thresholds, rhyming with the Prophet of Stockton & Taylor.
Mirror – The central image. To look into it is to see both self and system, watcher and watched. The loop never fully closes as long as reflection continues.
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