AI, Basic Income, and the Buddhist Agenda
I’m too old to learn a new way of earning,
to navigate bleak wastelands where artificial
intelligence makes glaciers calve with a great
violence and splash. The waters are rising and soon
everyone will be selling to everyone else 24/7
and who will have time to read
anything? Even to myself, I sound like doom
in a sandwich board ringing a bell in the town square
and I’m not proud of that, nor of the weakness
that keeps me from leaving every comfort I know
to live by the sun’s schedule and grow my own
food—corn, beans, and squash, the sacred trio
indigenous people knew well before my ancestors came
with their grim monoculture. The strands of my hungers
tangle and clash and I do get it, the temptation
to walk away and leave the oven on a timer, something
else in charge, since we’ve burned dinner so many times
the house smells of ash and surrender. I want more
than I should and definitely more gentleness for everyone:
grasses bending in the wind on a bluff overlooking
the sea, salt air scouring the darkness from our lungs,
no hint of our words scooped up and repurposed
by some inscrutable code. I want to believe
myself worthy, that none of us have to earn the right
to be, that wherever we existed before we were born here
we belonged so completely we had no doubt
this world would open its lush arms to us.
*
Katherine Riegel’s lyric memoir, Our Bodies Are Mostly Water, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in 2025. She is also the author of Love Songs from the End of the World (Main Street Rag), the chapbook Letters to Colin Firth (Sundress), and two more books of poetry. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Catamaran, One, Orion and elsewhere. She is managing editor of Sweet Lit and teaches online classes in poetry and cnf. Find her at katherineriegel.com.