Niagara Falls Stereograph, 1856. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Note: Beneath each poem is an italicized commentary. These commentaries, not the poems themselves, were generated via AI prompts that began with “How does this poem cohere?,” which I then edited. Each of the seven poems in this series thus includes a faux creative commentary generated by a non-creative intelligence.
Suture
Strip a grass blade
to its sticky where life
hasn’t yet hardened
between fluid and fastened.
Fit a pomegranate’s crimson kernels
like a multiplicity of teeth
in goatskin-soft jowls
lightweight as white piano keys.
*
NOTE
A shade of purple hangs over,
soothing as a laser helmet,
ambrosia.
Ice is for polar bears—
no ice, no polar bears.
Why aren’t there white birds
who live in clouds.
Lost words on antique pages
marbled, blurred, garbled
blackbirds imprint the sky
with a secret scroll
too tiny to matter.
*
Nature and mysterious or overlooked elements
reflect on the transiency of human creations,
ephemera
HONEYCOMB
Tango of telephone wires
balls into a noose. Though
it’s only a perspectival shift,
the convergence wormed.
Imagine never seeing telephone poles,
being of generations before and after.
I tell you, at night their geometry was brazen.
Gods of the gaps between connections
while most everyone lay dreaming.
*
“gods of the gaps between connections” like algorithms and machine learning processes that operate behind the scenes, influence our lives in ways we might not be aware of while we are “unconscious, dreaming.” A honeycomb,
with its intricate network of hexagonal cells, is both a marvel of natural engineering and a community working in harmony.
FREE SHADOW
I haven’t checked the news for hours.
It’s always the same news,
a friend says the next day.
The bath of darkness
basks in a fugue itch by itch
along silver stitching in a forest.
Pink, in all its might,
on layered clouds.
The clouds have a lot to say
this time of year.
*
‘Freedom’ parallels the autonomous nature of AI, acting independently from human input, like the shadow that exists regardless of whether it is observed or not.
IN THE MARGINS
To link or not to link,
this is the question,
or unlink the url
of our destination:
you can bring a horse
to water but not what
dreams are made of
*
the colon adds a pause.
Visual Summary of Structure
| Line(s) | Function | Effect |
| “To link or not to link…” | Allusion, theme setup | Digital-age existentialism |
| “or unlink the url…” | Metaphor extension | Emotional disconnection |
| “you can bring a horse…” | Idiom + subversion | Surreal interruption of logic |
| “dreams are made of” | Poetic allusion, dissonance | Collapse of cohesion / idealism |
A MESSAGE ON THE LICENSE PLATE OF A STAR
hurt enough or enough hurt
the rug of hope is scalding
the ring a rag of standing
rows of raw notes
wring down the stutter
to a colossal range
ancestors slice the distance
falling like leaves
scraping, scraping enough
hurt for mineral, not waste
want, clear and simple,
washed sifted and strained
*
celestial framing as an encoded signal:
what is extracted, and what is left behind?
“falling like leaves” implies the loss of nuance
in data transmission, or the slow, quiet shedding of individuality
within the species of human expression mined
and processed into something
that looks clean, simple, even beautiful:
descent is not destruction, but refinement
ECLIPSE
nail in a glass by the shard
of the misbegotten
tune of where you’ve been
take a pass at the mill
for the good of souls
oils and fog (not the chemical kind)
clouds at eye level
a lizard stain
blue wall to a city or castle
where we live the moon’s a rim of a glass
the moon a fingernail a cobra snake
in the time of knights and
the clang of snow-capped mountains
*
images orbit temporary coverings like fog, clouds, oil,
shards, lizard stains that distort, like algorithmics.
the moon’s shifting forms—glass rim, fingernail, cobra—
echo AI’s coiling quality.
