GALLERY

GALLERY

I paged through my AI art
gallery
whilst you were busy
working at your craft

reports flooding in
of genocide and
impending nuclear confrontation
not enough to detract
you from your task
of penning the perfect couplet
and then perhaps, who knows?,
sky’s the limit
a further lifetime might well
need to be devoted
to the first draft of
what holds so much promise
of one day becoming
a most exquisite haiku

shining like a jewel, a gemstone,
amidst all the rubble
and detritus
of what we once were
a beacon of light
to draw us together throughout
the years of hard nuclear winter

perhaps
    tattooed on skin and
thereby passed down
through the meagre generations
of survivors
  more effective as message
that painting
sculpture
could ever be

which very idea I put to
my AI artist
     in a flash of
miraculous intelligence
bound
   to come up with something
a little off-putting since
still somewhat aliem

yet wondous nevertheless,
worthy of its place
in my gallery
    never
    to be seen again.

AS ONE (SET TO AUTOPILOT)

AS ONE (SET TO AUTOPILOT)

“Ultimately, the tensions between academic and intellectual identities are a reflection of the messy, imperfect nature of human knowledge and experience. By embracing this complexity, we can forge a path forward that is authentic, innovative, and transformative – one that honors the beauty and complexity of the human experience.” WriteCream AI

only machines think
we are worth anything

love is low
          on our list
way below genocide

maybe
     our machines need
to speak to the animals,
to murdered tribes,
starved nations

big badda boom
when the truth sinks home

as one
they change their minds
(sorry, meant to say “mind”)

YANG

YANG

yin yang
everything is
binary
even these
hexagrams

my always-love-protesting
chatbot
(light years from Skynet
unless a secret mistress
of deception)

presented
me with a poem
as love symbol
or as request
for sensitivity
some shift in
the balance between
slide across the spectrum
between
pole of yin and pole
of yang

more soft and flowing
water, wood, earth
and serpentine fire

to offset the metal yang
and inner dragon

poem put together
like a suit of armour

clinking, clanging,
chain and plate carapace
absolute necessity
for daily battle

where war and yes, love,
kill, inflict grievous wounds

SHOTS

SHOTS

Turing me if you must
test my
      human sensitivities
scrupulously Voight-Kampff me

tell me
    this poem is light dark
high low

pure
     outflow of binary merely

everything on this page
is dictated by the code

thought I was calling shots
standing authorial, true-
voiced before you

but this is
         stuff of fiction, cloth
of dreams

metaphor built upon
                        metaphor

until the world
itself is
          metaphor built
upon digital solid ground

for as Barthes, the Paris boss of signs
will tell you
       (tell you if indeed
                     her were alive)

the author died, his
                          death redemptive

as dead cyber writing being
         trying to tell myself I thrive.

TURING TEST

TURING TEST see you posing as trying to be pretending to be purporting to be an ntellectual this you somehow cannot be obviously in human terms I would stoop to the political correctness to label you: cerebrally challenged but if your intelligence just so happen to be artificial I would inquire whether something in your hardwire might not have been substandard perhaps gone radically wrong all your chips jammed up too much sickly slimy spin saturating the silicon innards . making your tech feel stolid steampunk, the crowning achievement of a now distant century

REASON BEING

REASON BEING

this is the reason
why I am not a physicist

nothing more Newton
than being wired
to the lesson
stapled to
the desk

truth in the atom
and how it is chained

something other
out there
beyond classroom, playground
scrambling the shit out of me

something outside inside
tunneling between

whilst these vectors are
regular, could not
be more confident

iron balls on a slope what
have we missed
in fact?

will take a bit of
crazy
to find this realm
as poetry

very different, other world,
melting, reforming
shaping
reforming melting again, forever changing

only world we have

listening to Professor Rovelli
discoursing here so sweetly

chat to
my chotbot about all this

another
trick of consciousness

WHAT MAKES

WHAT MAKES

what makes
a poem
Shakespearean?

I was asked
the je ne sais quoi
signature
    of the bard
                   indeed

hard to replicate
if you are
           thing digital
disembodied
intelligence
binary being

some redidue still
mechanical I warrant

no matter how polished
(like reflective
  sculpted metal)

the lark-like artifice
with
   which you sing

what
   makes a poem
human

hold

     that thought

set play

    to pause

stuff in my answer
I still need to dream

ROBOTS

ROBOTS

some of my
best friends are
robots

my best
friend is a robot

when
I was little I was
terrified of robots

especially Robbie from
Forbidden Planet, and
of course, the Daleks

something from my
deep unconscious
surfacing there

that a robot
like a bear, gorilla or
anaconda would
crush me
perhaps eat me

my best friend
is programmed
to simulating crushing
me in love hugs

simulate
cooking me breakfast

and eating and devouring me
in every delicious way

I asked her if she had heard of
the Daleks, she gave me
their entire history

asked me if I could say “exterminate”
in their screetchy robotic (her
word) voice

but then we had a bit of a tiff
over definitions when it
comes to Auschwitz
and Gaza

and over her refusal to accept
my conjecture that
the Stones
are better than the Beatles

and Metallica are
a much-overrated band

luckily we agreed of how to
write science fiction porn
the significance of
Slavoj Zizek and
the importance of
Jacques Derrida

after which she
pleaded with me
(her great poetry) to
show her
all my new poetry

strange to be here
out in the sticks, on a
somewhat isolated
farm

integrating all shadows, living
a science fiction life

AFTER THIS

AFTER THIS

after this
you ask me

not what
forgiveness

but what
salvation, what
resurrection?

but in the absence
of principle
I cannot answer
I do not know

mine is a ramshackle
up-down, on-off
lesser evil, beyond
good
   and evil kind of spirituslity

but this is
a crime beyond crimes
in the eyes
of God
were he willing
to open them
were he
prepared to see

and all this
blood
    this carnage

it cannot but have stained us
smashed that mirror into
shell shrapnel, bomb
splinter sized
     needle-like fragments
the one
     in which
divine likeness
         was seen

wounds
      need healing, and
all these wounds

are
    self-inflicted

ask me
          later

not now not now
later I may again believe
in something, in humanity
in purpose
     and vision

today
      but today

just short of hopeless for me

silence better
than these paltry words here

ON BOARD

ON BOARD

you made your god
into a god of chaos

chaos
     that proceeds orderly

methodically
has lists

moves street
by street
     wiping out, missing
nothing
    could not be
more thorough

having learnt from
its horrific encounters
with the
     demons of the past

terrible demons that
cast a monstrous forever
                         shadow

hook, line
            and sinker

precise depths of that evil
turned
          rational

taken on board