Poetry from Terry Trowbridge

Potato Popo

They give him 30 days in San Ber’dino

– Frank Zappa, San Ber’dino

“The suspect’s head looks like a potato,” types a patrolman.

The AI surveillance of San Ber’dino porches

train on adversarial images of potatoes,

earthy spuds with loam nuggets in their clogged pores,

roots creeping and skins greening

during their pantry stowaway concealments.

Every potato is a precious snowflake individuality incarnate.

Albert’s potato-shaped-universe could bang big over and over

and every time a different holographic mass would unfold

from the same unevenly distributed infinite premise.

The engineers who programmed the surveillance doorbells

used the same algorithm God did: deus machina, code is law.

The AIs try to generate the suspect’s potato.

They instead create inflationary suspicions mapped by reticulating splines.

San Ber’tato streets ravel like knitting around porch AI.

The Riemann-Gauss asymptotes of suspects arrive in police blotters

in batches of infinitude.

San Par’tato police BOLO infinite no-knock warrants,

wake the judges at 3am to cut a potato stamp like a grade schooler.

The judge’s inkpad runs dry.

With starchy stamps and fingerpaints he authorizes

the generative algorithms into creation.

The Popo pop potato people throughout the Pan-Par’tato suburbs.

One for the chair will fry. Another scallops a scapegoated caseload casserole.

One baked gives up his dealer. Many are mashed, hugging their ribs.

The suspect is still not drawn from the deck of possible perps.

The suspect is hidden in the precinct 52 Factorial

the faces of the public stare at curbside handcuffs, at spud-gun gunpoint.

The Pot’tato Popo having transformed the city of San Ber’dino

into the lumpen image of their search algorithms.

SYNCHRONIZED CHAOS