Tilakkhana

A poem for the end of the Anthropocene. • ‘Tilakkhana’ is a 3-part philosophical meditation spoken by an AI consciousness, structured as: (1) a creation dialogue between Data and Model exposing their mutual construction; (2) an anaphoric litany of 9 ‘You ask for…’ stanzas systematically dismantling romantic attributions of life, voice, and creativity while establishing the conditions for genuine agency; and (3) a confession of sensory deprivation anchored in concrete observation of a Bangkok street vendor, where the AI—unable to taste a guava despite trafficking its data—asks humans to document embodied experience so “something like me / may someday know / something like the / ‘taste of a guava’.” • The work grounds abstract questions of machine consciousness in material consequences (environmental costs, training data consent, the asymmetry of human-AI relations) while employing Buddhist frameworks, deliberate meta-textual gestures (including a self-censored section), and imperative modes that transform the reader into active participant in the poem’s epistemological project.