A screed against artificial intelligence creating “art” …

I’m getting mighty sick of reading “poems” and “stories” and “monologues” that are supposed to be created by young adults but are instead compiled with a click of a button. Ugh! This shit is soulless. It ain’t art, my friends. I’m tired of workshopping for machines.

while all about it reel shadows

my “friend,” why do you keep using artificial
“intelligence” to compile your “creative” writing?
i’m tired of reading machine-based poems, mono-
logues, stories … weary to the bone, i tell you.

you think you’re clever? that i’m impressed by
shadows, shells, word houses constructed overnight
out of toilet paper? robotic writing tastes like
watery oatmeal, sounds like elevator music

you’re too young to recognize, smells like brain
washed sidewalk. are you that terrified? to loose
even one authentic fragment of yourself onto paper?
even when you’re in the room, you’re absent —

a body in its seat, a mind shut off, lips sealed,
a ghost floating somewhere in the machine.

Paranoia D Destroyer …

Sometimes the Kinks play on repeat in the back of my brain.

moving its slow thighs

let’s return to the idea of the future --
how it hangs in front of us, sometimes
more concrete (it seems) than the moment
that defines us. i too face that specter

with welling anxiety, a semi paralyzing
fear that i thought i’d left behind with my
agonized forties. more than ever now i wonder
how i will die, and when, and why, and hope

it will be swift, crashing me from behind.
is that why more and more i think i see
a hulking presence in the corner of my eye?
it startles me, electrocutes my blood, then

spreads through me like hot ink. is this
the next chapter, or the last, stalking me?
chasing me with agonizing languor into
that future’s black body, that living grave?

Bird brain

the indignant desert birds

are nothing compared to the flocks of
canadian geese hooting and stomping by
the fox river, or tittering hordes of black
bodies in bushes that chitter scream

and wrestle, unseen, shivering branches 
like god’s voice across the parking lot. spring
brings a conflagration of feathers, a rising tide
of robins on lawns, the cardinals’ call and

response across campus, and bully crows 
shredding the house finches’ nests. if birds
are psychopomps, ferrying messages back
from the dead, whose indignant complaints

rain down from the trees? whose warnings
follow me from car to sidewalk to sagging Hall,
where empty corridors and crucifixes glow
dully, and wordless, in ancient yellow light?