Autopilot, Autocorrect, Automatica

Writing a poem on a Waymo:

I typed I love you and it changed to I live you—
which felt truer, somehow, the way I've been living you lately: running your name through my mouth like a route I no longer see, the drive home so practiced my hands forget they're steering.

Autopilot is just another word
for trust in repetition.
The car knows the lane.
The phone knows the word.
The body knows to breathe
even when the mind has wandered
three cities away,
composing replies it will never send.

But sometimes it flinches—
duck for what I meant, he'll for the place I was going
Maybe that's the gift of the glitch:
the machine's small confession
that it doesn't know me either,
that we're both just guessing
at what comes next,
fingers hovering over
the vast predictive field
of what we might mean
if we meant to mean it.

Automatica: the study of letting go of the wheel.
The antonym of presence. The comfort of coasting. And still—
the car gets you there.
The text gets sent.
The breath keeps arriving,
whether you notice or not.