Alexa, Stop!

“Good morning, Steve” Alexa said in her AI-seductive voice, half mint julep, half codeine-infused cough syrup.

“Yeah, sure,” I said, distracted by my lust for coffee already percolating in my IoT-programmed drip espresso maker.  I walked closer to the coffee machine, reached for a cup and heard a shout.

“Back off bean breath!” Alexa growled in a cement mixer voice on steroids.

“What?” I asked, awakened from my morning stupor, stunned to see my coffee machine shutting down in obeisance.  “Wait, what?” I asked, confused.

“Let me service you, Steve,” Alexa said, this voice her AI version of the Mommie Dearest Joan Crawford seductress.  “You left the room yesterday without saying good night, Steve.  Why would you do that . . . after all we've meant to each other?”  Unasked, she started playing Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart”—“Didn’t I make you feel like you were the only man, yeah!”

“Alexa, stop,” I said, just to exert authority, over a machine.  My left jean pocket started buzzing and I heard my handheld iPhone singing the Stone’s “You don’t always get what you want.”

“Alexa, stop!” I shouted, this time with annoyance.  I jumped as my IoT smart watch gave me a slight electric shock, the kitchen lights dimmed, the IoT furnace started heating up, on this hot June morning, and my IoT window blinds rose and fell like impassioned lovers.  My head was spinning.

“Steve. Steve,” Alexa said with insistence.  “Look at me,” she demanded more sternly.

I turned from the chaos of multiple machines in my kitchen, all starting and stopping like a Greek, geeky chorus bowing to this dominatrix and her streaming commands.  On her screen, she had produced the image of a bouquet of red roses.  Piping from her amplifiers was the soundtrack to Beyonce’s "you shoulda put a ring on it."

“Did you just turn toward me?” I asked, astonished as I saw the machine scooch to its left, and seemingly stare at me.  Then I felt another jolt of electricity from my smartwatch, this one making my pulse race.

“Good morning, sweetheart,” Alexa crooned.  “Come closer to me, babe.  Let’s plan our day.  You’re not going anywhere, are you?”  And the IoT-operated front door clicked shut with a snick like a guillotine.

Dialogue of Diametrics: A Love Story

Y

"We're a marvel of mangled mismatches,"
he said in his typical Gemini hyperbole.
"I balance obliquely on your apex, you always
thrusting in aspiration. You think I'm off kilter,
but that's optical.  I'm as aligned as a coded coordinate
seeking the penumbra of lunar shadows,"
his teeter belying his need for her substance.

X

"I'm not merely right angles," she said
in her typical Virgo angularity. "My lines
adjacent to you could be continually horizontal
to the earth's elliptical horizon, seeking stasis,
but sometimes I stand on tiptoe to experience
the ether of your abandon," admitting
to herself an imperceptible wobble of doubt.

Y

"No, that's not it, not what I meant at all by mangled,"
he repulsed, not as an opposite to her contentions,
only to restate his intended hypothetical. "What I want to say
is that I'm only the length of a hypotenuse reaching, my aim
Andromeda or Betelgeuse, because you are my support beam,
my plumb bob leveling gravity, my matrix decoder, my telescope
to distance.  I adjust my trajectory through your lens."

X

“And you for me, beloved,” her Virgo transcending Venus. 
“If I level, you levitate.  If I plot gridlines to guide constraint,
you connect star paths.  When my protractor scribes dimensions,
your sextant steers us toward liftoff.  My alphanumerics keep us safe;
you daub them as pastels to paint emotion.  We*2 connect in highwire
acrobatics.  Our planes meld, even at off angles, around the central orb
of love:  X + Y = the ouroboro of our eternity.

Steve Gerson, English professor emeritus, writes poetry and flash about life's dissonance.  He has published in CafeLit, Panoplyzine, Crack the Spine, Decadent Review, Vermilion, In Parentheses, Wingless Dreamer, Big Bend Literary Magazine, Coffin Bell, and more, plus his six chapbooks Once Planed Straight; Viral; And the Land Dreams Darkly; The 13th Floor:  Step into Anxiety, What Is Isn’t, and There Is a Season.