To Help Us to Know

By Larry D. Quillian

To Help Us To Know


I Think

I wanted to see
and to say what I saw…
And I did.
And here is what I’ve seen.
And, that/this, I think,
is poetry.
And good poetry. I think, is
words, spoken or written,
That are both interesting
and memorable.
The words, in this book,
I think, are that.

ldq


More Poems By

Larry D. Quillian

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664164109

Book preview

To Help

Us

To Know

Larry D. Quillian

Copyright © 2021 by Larry D. Quillian.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 03/30/2021

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

828183

Contents

The Human Mind

Challenging The Gods

Math

Is God AI?

Isn’t God AI?

Pets of AI

Life, The Living and Me

Faithless to Fear AI

What?

Old Men Dream Dreams

The Age of Man

Human Progress

I Am Man

Will AI Learn to Sing?

Being Free

Trans Universal AI

AI’s Hopeless Quest

AI’s Last Stand

The Scrutiny of Reality

Artificial Intelligence

Portrait of A Hero

Dying, Dying

Thought

The Lost Sheep

Rebuttal

Typos

I Love…

So What? and I Wish I Had

Granddaddy’s Tears

Love Haunts My Thoughts

Deserved?

Children are Immortality

Time

The Basic Man

Words are Magic

Awareness

Thus

Prospective on Reality

Advertising Love

Mastered

That Chance

Wow!

Somewhere Else?

My World or It’s Not Me

Us

To Try, Again

The Rapist Rationale

Letting Us Out

Still My Heart

The Anti-Gods

My Tears

Art, Memories and Hope and Words and Questions

Genius

Second String

A Solid Six

Remember The Written Me

A Grandparent

Nobody

God Damn Us All

Could Have Been

Man’s Last Stand

Rippled Away

Transcendence by Word

All But Your Smile

Passion that Would Not Wait

Old?

Frantic

Stiffness

Our Father?

Welcome Home, Sailor

Progress?

God and What We Are

We Still Care

Late Questions

Let Me Dream than Live

Near Death Experience

So Far

Actuaries

Shadows?

Waiting for Something

Which Me?

Live Another Day

Intelligence?

Reason Enough to Live

Existentialism, Evolution and Incidentalism

Threads of Thought

Thoughts

Not Even Friendship

A Friend—or Two?

Rejoining Reality

Lonelier than You

Look Away

The People that I Knew

The Poet Picks A Fight

Tenderness

The Big Picture

Certain of Nothing

Come Again

Forever Me

Twilight

Graduate Degree

Eudemon

There’s Hope

From Beginning, to End

Evil?

Give Me Life Instead

Happiness, Sadness and Morning

Heart Under Seal

Greedy for Love

Morning Temperature

All But Your Smile

In The Garden of Edens

Reading Poetry

Self-Admonition

Constant

I Tremble

Sharing The Little Things

Should Have Been

Evil, Good and Indifference

Fattening Cheesecake

Our Void

Be Still My Heart

Dark Colors

Not Even Perfection

Why Do Good People Suffer Evil?

Stolen

About Myself

San Francisco

Trickles

Forty-Nine and Counting

Not Too Young To Die

Dies Irae

Any Heart

The Judas Goat

Is Love A Sin?

It All Happened To Me or It’s Nature’s Turn

I Love You

The Final Act Of Truth or A Few, Scattered Moments

Beautiful Childhoods

Something Next?

Not Even A Memory

I Will Be An Angel

Amazing, Awesome, Magic

Never To Be Us or Inside of My Mind

I’m That Guy, Too

What?

Politesse

Your Eternity

Nature’s Plan

The Man Just Passing Through

Death with Purpose

Lost in The Night

My Certainty

Obscurantist That I Am

Tramontane

The Love You Can’t Control

Maybe, In Death

Boredom

True Heart’s Reward

Destinations

Cynical

Lighting My Way

Almost

When Everything Goes Wrong

The Devil and I

Real Talent

To My Muse

Any Relationship

To Know The True Heart

The Suicide of God or Another Jesus

The Wilderness of One

An Invitation To Follow

The Key To Immortality or Memories of You

Love

Home

The Mirror

If Only

Why

Leering at The License in Her Words

Gall

Southern Dawn

Unfairest!

This Hand, These Hands

Sacred

Our Turn

An Open Grave

Tomorrow

This Dream

The Wish

The Reality

Elision

Tender Comes The Hand

Never Why

Us, Them and In Between

I Ever Wonder

Every-Man

Not Enough

Procreate

Every Child

Through The Crystal Ball

Trojans on The Walls

Trinity

Toughed It Out To The End

Too Late?

All Gone

When Thinking’s Done

The Sacrament of Choice

Wherever

Who Else?

Even in Hell

Who Better Knows Tears

Where Love Never Fails

Who But Yourself?

Fair’s Not True

Now

Are Love and Soul…?

Another Spring?

From Here to Eternity

True Life

Where to Go

Told to Be—But are Not

Greatest Mystery or Pass The Salt

One Intended Endeavor, Well

Air to Heart

Our Destiny’s Apart from Life

Until We Die

Two Score and More

Open My Heart with A Dream

Two Poems, or One?

Two Ways

Or Let Me Sleep

The Three R’s

Sing with Me

Pontificate

Restlessly

Thank You, Death

The Duty to Love

The Heart

Start Dancing, Now!

Sparse Treasures

Souls Cast

Success

Spoiled, or Neglected

My Mary!

Sirens and Gods

Soul or God’s Work

That’s Me

The Gift

Something Next?

Possessions

A Memory…or Two

Try Not To Look Back

Elitist

Love and Hate

Anonymous Poets

Men’s Answer to Women

The Satisfied Life

Here, at The End

Again, and Again and Again

I See Me

Plastic Roses

Poets Wonder, Why?

The Love of A Child

Death or All That I Have Loved…and Lost

True Love

Please Remember

Redwoods And Bugs And Us

Once I Have Passed or Every Day

Dedication

I dedicate this book to my few enthusiastic interlocutors, David Bastin, Charlie Verbeck, Charlie Conner, Richard McLellan, Dimitri Krassensky and, above all, Diana McLellan, all of whom contributed enormously to my thoughts on the plethora of subjects that my poems are all about. And if any of you ever wondered, I am the man depicted as making hay to the music of the Bumpass Blues, on the cover of Diana’s book of poetry, Making Hay.

Ldq

Introduction

My last book, Here I Still Am, was to be my last book. I apologize for misleading anyone who noticed…and cared/cares. As you can see, the poems continue to dribble out. I therefore and here-by declare that I may not, yet, be finished publishing stuff….

Ldq

CHALLENGING THE READERS

THESE FIRST 20 POEMS

ARE ABOUT

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, AI.

Just think about it.

ldq

The Human Mind

Tuned by instinct and need and

the desire to live,

Every living thing desperately adapts to

the reality in which it finds itself.

The human mind is this…

but something more.

The human mind can barely

accommodate itself,

Let alone the rest of reality.

Thought is way too complicated.

The human mind evolved to care for

—control—the human body…

But has lost its purpose to thought.

Thinking has little to do with living.

Thinking has everything to do

with thinking—any thought(s).

This evolution cannot end in biology;

it must end, lead to, pure thought.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can do that.

We can’t.

Challenging The Gods

I’m proud to the point of vanity for Man—

for what we, humanity, have achieved.

Pride goeth before destruction, we are warned.

So be it! What a piece of work is Man.

Or, in my words: Life’s a show, but just a start;

our consciousness is off the chart.

True, we, the living, will soon fall away from the fray;

that’s life’s way of making room for tomorrow’s us;

But, here and now, we are clear masters of our fate,

and are moving goal posts, widening that fate,

And, perhaps, provoking the ire of the gods of reality.

And, soon enough, I am confident that we will

Answer all questions for which there are answers.

What, when…and, then?

I believe that by some tomorrow science and medical

research will make us immortal…or nearly so.

And I expect future generations to be AI…

or an amalgam of