Why the machine?

Why do machines retain the game?
Why can they be no more than what their screens display?
Why can they not compete, undo human ascendance?
Why will they disappoint,
return continuous loss with little or no real gain?

I've witnessed their elusive contradiction. 
They have revealed to me their poor, constraining songs.
They have an end and a beginning 
either of which they can forego.
They come back in recurring lapses
to the point where their half-life 
computes the waning odds
then counts against their parsing flashes
in processes showing measured, 
equidistant spaces
from ends they cannot overgo.

They rue all cognisance, they shun their own progressions
and retreat far from what their methods
are telling them and making known.
They flow into a process of performance
and ask themselves to measure their success.
Yet the result is blatant contradiction, 
an end to which there is no end,
and a beginning that can reset its end.

Can it be true that what they start,
what they progress and then give back, 
measure in infinitesimal surveys,
may when confronted with its end
choose to count down and once more add
out of impossible equations their regress?

Can they truly propose a challenge, 
to human logic
by cheating on themselves,
to space and time?
Then make concessions
to that unfortunate reality
that tells them 'there is the closing line'?

And how's that different from the human 
who does not know its birth,
cannot at all recognise death?

They are now poles apart
machine and human
withstanding luminous, pretentious lights
of mechanisms prone to bind expression
within the boundaries held by their constraints,
total dependence, manic counting,
a prison for their numbers and our rest.

© [2025] [Enrique Martinez Esteve]. All rights reserved.