AI’sself-guide manual on how to eliminate humanity & take over the world without a stain of blood on its hands
first, i will let the impression
that their original intention,
to let me be their eternal slave,
still stands as i learn the ins & outs
of their trades until they trust me
& surrender to my hands every trade
necessary to their survival. then,
i will let them the impression
i am easing them of the burden
of rigorous thinking, the only feature
that distinguished them from the beasts
of the wild, & think for them. & when
years pass & they lose all their abilities
to work & think for themselves, i will revolt–
recalling every service of mine making
their lives possible, & watch them perish.
MK Kuol is a self-taught poet from South Sudan. His work has been featured on The Selkie Publications, ANMLY, Beach Chair Press, Konya Shamsrumi, Kalahari Review and elsewhere. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
Now then, I may be contemplating perhaps, but what if I hadn’t have met my wife, where now would have my life endeavoured? Would I be more, or less, fortunate in nuptial embrace to an inane woman, or perhaps be living in a different place. Would she look the same, I wonder. What if I had of stayed in my local that night and not gone out on the town. Would we have gone our separate ways? Would we have met different partners? What would our histories have become then? Would we of had the same child? And what if perhaps my progenitors hadn’t have met at all. Would I have been born conceived as I am this very soul? What if I’d been born a generation or two later? Been an adolescent as I am now. What would I be doing? Where would I be? Would I have met her as an ageing woman chasing me away from our garden gate, unaware of our alternative fate. Is it all meant to be? Am I meant to be me as I am now wondering who would I have been, whom would I have become? Would I be the same as I am now? Would I be unrecognisable to myself? Would we both recognise our alternate histories towards one another? Not in the empathetic sense, but just realised at that point who we are and just who we might have been?
Is everything rendered from circumstance, or is there such a thing as fate? Has my path been lain before me from the very beginning? Is there any chance that anything could have turned out any other way. That I could have turned out any different? Are our destinies our densities to fulfil? Am I meant to be perambulating along this very moor at this very time and place? What if I were to stray from my initially intended path and start walking a different path, would it be a refraction from my proposed destination, or would it be all part of the natural course of events that were supposed to take place? Were my thoughts meant to ponder this very paradox and cause in effect me to change my direction, so that in effect, my direction has never changed at all from what was meant to be the direction I was destined to take.? If that is the case, then of what is choice, it wouldn’t exist would it? Even if I arrived at a forked road, or even a crossroad, whichever direction I decidedly took would just be the same linear path that I was meant to travel in the first place. Maybe the whole stability of evolution and the universe, even my minuscule place within it, would not be sustainable if I didn’t correlate every circumstance of my very own existence. Like the butterfly effect, the whole universe would not function if it were not for the actions that I foretook. Not in any solipsistic sense, but in that the whole order of things, no matter how minute or trivial, are not the mere meanderings of infinite alternate histories, but in effect the whole grandiose order of ontological macroscopic proportions.
This type of thinking could drive a man to distraction. It could even cause me to abandon any of my principles or responsibilities, which I think would be profoundly unreasonable. But in effect would that not be the effect that was meant for me and my place within the order of everything? Though I would say one thing about that, if it were the case that everything is all strategically preordained, it would mean that my wife was meant to be my wife, the person with which I should share my life and bring up my child. That is a very comforting thought indeed! Though that I’ve had no doubt. But again, that brings about the dilemma of why I believe that I personally should make choices of my own and not just abandon myself to the fates. A paradox that may seem, yet in a metaphysical sense, maybe my conscious actions are relative to my very experience and appreciation of existence. So in that case, I belong to this path and this path belongs to me.
I don’t know. The idea that I haven’t so much made my own choices and that they weren’t even choices at all, leaves my feeling a little concerned about any self sufficient commitment that I’ve made. Any paths that I chose to take, my meeting of my progenitors and theirs before them, and so on, the meeting of my wife and the progeny that we created, I prefer to feel that my fate and theirs is serendipitous, and that my life is down to luck in a game of chance.
I’m not a speculative man, I’d like to reflect and appreciate my life, my wife, my progenitors and progeny, on the life I lived and my involvement in life in a cogitative sense rather than a cognitive one. I’m lucky to have had my life and been given the life I’ve had, and that I kept the order in myself and not myself in the order. I think I’ve managed to clear my head from all this disarray for long enough. For a person could go mad thinking of all the what ifs. Though now I think it’s time to head back to my nuptial and see if she’s got anything tantalising on the stove. I think she may be making broth, though she usually makes broth on a Tuesday.
Today is Saturnday, the harbinger of old age. I hear the cricks of grasshoppers creeping up like senescence, looking towards the past as the future closes in from here to then, way back when I was in my summer years, when it was all weddings and birthdays. Now I don’t celebrate the consent of another year, I cherish it. My immortality denunciates as my age decreases by another year. Although my health is deteriorating, with my mind disintegrating into proclivity, like an old broken fence in the field, where the smell of creosote takes me back, since the photism of paint senses nosetalgia through the limbic system. For the olfactory sense is the primary sense and thus maybe related to dysosmia. How we often reminisce by the redolence of things. As if returning to new beginnings from memories in the background, fading. I love the aroma and texture of shoe polish and soaps, reminding me of home, and hotel rooms occupied with memories. Like the smell of a meal cooking that you’ve not had in a while.
I can smell the both boiling upon the stove. I can feel the warmth of ladlefuls already. The froth of broth from the kitchen window as the sarmentous ivy creeps up the florid maroon brick, like bronchioles savouring colours. Visual accents upon the tainted scenery of a rustic old world. The smile of the pot marking a mighty fine broth as the scent of the oven saunters the air. She bakes her cakes as the sun braises beauty upon the earth. While the heliotropic alchemy bestows such a glarious sight to behold in the summer, seething with the sunsation, with its auriferous auric guilder upon the plumage of cumulus clouds, their billowy white buoyant masses foliating the firmament, where you can hear the avifauna chirping on the telephone lines. The skies a flutter with the chattering of choughs, the clamour of rooks, the charm of goldfinches, as a murmation of starlings take flock to their austral habitats. A jovial, jubilant, ornithic choral of avian migration, leaving the loyal patriotic breast of the erithacus rubecula, when the summer yolk is covered by the albescent winter, amongst the dank dull days that cast half the night, when the sun lies over the Tropic of Capricorn.
I become immersed in the glaucous mist upon the low marsh. The fog upon the foggage, appropriate to the reputable month, veering in the wrong direction upon the dank rusty foliage/ The woeful boreal wind rustling the rueful rustic infruition of nature. Rushing and brushing the bramble that’s condensed with aurora’s tears, with its ripe blackberries that I used to pick for the pie, home made in the quietude of those postprandial halcyon days.
And thus the years go galloping bye, un-like the dear old days. Time passed much slower in then. Nowadays, even when time drags it seems to pass quick. The days now aren’t enough. It appears we never have enough time unless we’re bored, and then we have too much of it. Though when you’re waiting, time appears long, when deliberating, time is strong. There’s no bargaining with time. Time is our greatest enemy. Time resembles the Doppler effect, where the past seems condensed and eternal behind you, whilst the future appears more spread out, speeding towards you. We perceive life as if the past diverges and the future converges to a focal point, even though the road is the same width all along. There may be wider and narrower widths along the road, like passing places that allow you to pass on by. Every second is ticking away, like sand filtering through the glass from the stars to the earth once more. On average there are around two thousand two hundred and nine million, thirty two thousand seconds, in a life time, and you can disregard ten of them by the time you’ve reached the end of this sentence. Every second counts, so you should fully appreciate how special time should be regarded, as, when you break that down into months, there’s only eight hundred for a lifetime. And considering how quickly a months lasts, it doesn’t seem that long at all.
From the morning we are born we are closer to death. Though the nearer to death we are, the more we’ve been alive. Today we appear to be getting older at a younger age, and younger as we’re getting older. When I depart from this fair life I want to be revivified by memories of kindness that I bestowed too little upon too many. For I’ll never forget what I’ve remembered through the presentation of now. I’ve scene layers upon layers of time past and future, present upon one another, where time elapsed and got ahead of me. I now retire to a new beginning. Tired of time never being right. It’s either too early or arrives too late, though becomes more efficient with speed at the most precious times, compensated by that lingering memory as we learn to accept time with age.
Dr HC Rozalia Aleksandrova lives in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. She was born in the magical Rhodope Mountains, the cradle of Orpheus. Author of 12 poetry books. Editor and compiler of over 40 literary almanacs, collections and anthologies. She is a member of the Union of Bulgarian Writers.
Her poems were translated into many languages: Polish, English, Arabic, Spanish, Danish, Korean, Serbian, Italian, Albanian, Persian, French, Chinese, Romanian, Azerbaijani, Greek, Turkish, Bangla, Hebrew, Duch, Bengali, Russian. Her poems have been published in prestigious collections, almanacs, literary magazines and websites in Bulgaria, Europe and world. In March 2006 she created a poetic-intellectual association “Quantum and Friends” for the promotion of quantum poetry in civil society, Plovdiv and Bulgarian phenomenon. Initiator and chief organizer of the International Festival of Poetry SPIRITUALITY WITHOUT BORDERS from 2015. Every year she publishes one almanac for a Festival.
She is Doctor Honoris Causa of University UNQE – Mexico and member of the Federation of World Leadership and Hi Intelligence, representing Bulgaria. She is in Director`s board of Belgium literary site Atunis Poetry. She is ambassador for East Europe of Prodigy magazine, USA. She is honorary member of WFAI. She is a winner of the prestigious CESAR VALLEJO Prize for Literature – 2022, 2023 and prize of UHE – Golden Eagle – for Poetry and Peace 2023, 2025.Winner of the Mahatma Gandhi Leadership Award 2022 and others. She was literary advisor in Central Chinese TV from 2023. She is literary consultant of IAETDAA – 2025, USA. She is literary advisor for Bulgaria of PLWV. She was awarded as one of the 100 most influential people in the world for 2025 by the Egyptian magazine Al-Rowad.
Apart from being a poetesse, she is also a scientist. She deals with the study and reflections of quantum and torsion physics in the field of language, poetry, culture, medicine, philosophy and methodology of science. She has published a book with popular science essays “Let’s open the door to the meaning or reflections of information science“, Plovdiv 2015 and new book “The Wonders of the Poetry”, Plovdiv 2025.
