Long Programmers Poems

“Inside the Great Halls of Us”



Inside 
The Great Halls of Us,
there resides a ghost 

IT hides in plain sight,
waiting quietly, alone, 
in our dark

there, IT holds ITs light,
to draw us further in,
we nervously laugh IT...

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Ali's Song
by Michael R. Burch
for Muhammad Ali

They say that gold don’t tarnish. It ain’t so.
They say it has a wild, unearthly glow.
A man can be more beautiful, more wild.
I flung their medal to the river,...

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If your story
and history
or herstory,
is wrong,

If wrong is negative,
If right is positive,

When do two historic
two cultural
two personal
two political
two familial
wrongs make it right,
just as double negatives equal a positive?

Perhaps when this double-negative shy
not yang and not...

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Me 1, Me Too
(Developers at Facebook shut down an artificial intelligence (AI) program after it diverged from its script and started conversing with another AI in a language programmers could not understand.)


...Is there someone there?
Is there someone...

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Born after freedom; I witnessed 
The 25th year Independence Day celebration
The Silver Jubilee; the country was underdeveloped,
Yet there was jubilation, happiness all over

Years went by: I grew bigger
I witnessed the 50th too:The Golden Jubilee
The country...

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Born after freedom; I witnessed 
The 25th year Independence Day celebration
The Silver Jubilee; the country was underdeveloped,
Yet there was jubilation, happiness all over

Years went by: I grew bigger
I witnessed the 50th too:The Golden Jubilee
The country...

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(Proving Once And For All Time That Love Is Not Binary)

Definition of Variables 
X, PATH, JOHN, JOHNJOHN, MARSHA, MARSHAMARSHA, ALPHA, OMEGA

Initial Values
SET X=0, SET PATH = 1, SET JOHN = .5, JOHNJOHN = 1000,
MARSHA =...

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Tonight I will not write
of stars, nor moon,
seeds of wisdom--
just mind flattering
bloom--

Nor will I write of love--
neither here nor above;
though our dearest 
sentimentality, the heart, 
too often foolishly enacts 
its own fatality;

and if I decide...

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I really have outdone myself this time!
My ‘God Machine’ is finally in place!
I’ll never have to fret about a rhyme,
Or stop for a red light that changed from green 
As if it sought to put...

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Running this way and that, in search of some adventure new
The roads ran their course with flatirons the ruts not few
Over hill, mountain, river, valley, flood, glen and dale
To the open sea with long, sandy...

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In the cages at the zoo they crowded around each other
A million milling from father to brother
All speaking in a babel a million languages
From clicks and keyboard clacks  to switches and bandages
A group is...

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Oh Happy Day

Financial crisis
the Dj's sold out to the man
oh happy day on the radio
collective karma is the God they believe in
while Mammon teaches his machines to use phones
bill collectors and spam salesmen are calling
voices...

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Hubby was talking about the job he was at: when he suddenly…
Got into the ‘Computer Programmers Mode’. Where absolutely…
Everything became ‘DITS & DOTS, and DARS & FARS’…
No more caffeine for Hubby any time this week,...

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Facebook and the Senate
By Franklin Price
4/10/2018

Facebook and the Senate that I have seen today
Make it so apparent that the swamp intends to stay.
The self important Senators, who have shown up for the day,
Are grilling Facebook's...

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I hear it said AI in art it is cheating, destroyer of creativity, yet it seems to create something beautiful even if it wasn’t formed by human hands. I use spell check to correct the...

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From one film to the other, your creative styles,
Rebels joined, save a world, then you, sacrificed a girl,
Online programmers that you had caused their riles,
Mr. Santino wanted New York as part of his world,

New bodies...

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When people ask me of my religion, I say I am atheist in a demand of tolerance
And in the case of much too many, they never fail to show me their intolerance.
They've been programmed; dogmatic...

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We were still free to dream,
however, a tax on any imaginative writing
that contravened the rules or regulations
for literary acceptability 
or worse
were deemed counter-revolutionary.

In Poland, the last of the hold-outs
wrote odes to Chopin
but essentially all was...

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Ports and mods
programmers and developers
oldschool and would be forgotten
with their drives
and engines
the old is unearthed and regifted
like some sort of modern age
robin hood or
some guy fawkes mask wearing hood hell if I know
and this is...

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What is wrong with using "not"?
It is a negative to an eloquent adjective, verb or noun
Simply the opposite state of being; which one should NOT frown

For programmers, "not" is a logical complement
which helps us filter-out...

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Manifest Destiny
by Michael R. Burch

When you were in my house
you were not free—
in chains bound.

Manifest Destiny?

I was wrong;
my plantation burned to the ground.
I was wrong.
This is my song,
this is my plea:
I was wrong.

When you are...

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I whizzed past the assembler, add
count in octal, subtract 
hexadecimal. Found error 
in the dump file, all zeroes
and wondered, is this an omen?

Surprise! write me an algorithm
for a full third of test score.
Sort all data...

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Some Activision game fans may not know this, they may be unaware.
Activision wouldn't exist if Atari had been a company that was more fair.
Atari wouldn't give their programmers any recognition for their work and this...

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