The People of the Other Village
“We do this, they do that.
They peel the larynx from one of our brothers’ throats.
We devein one of their sisters.
The quicksand pits they built were good.
Our amputation teams were better.”
Posts Tagged "poem"
Poem with Human Intelligence
“In this century, chatbots write poems
where starlings wander from their murmuration
into the denim-thick clouds of a storm.”
The Monster in the Lake
“A city boy, I always wanted to go fishing. The DiFilippo brothers brought me
to a secret lake where we cast our lines into the dark, the barbed lures
spinning.”
On Disappearing
“I have not disappeared.
The boulevard is full of my steps. The sky is
full of my thinking. An archbishop
prays for my soul, even though
we met only once, and even then, he was
busy waving at a congregation.”
Love Like Salt
“It lies in our hands in crystals
too intricate to decipher”
The Look
“Strephon kissed me in the spring,
Robin in the fall,
But Colin only looked at me
And never kissed at all.”
A Word on Statistics
“Out of every hundred people
those who always know better:
fifty-two.
Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.”
Of Molluscs
“As the tide rises, the closed mollusc
Opens a fraction to the ocean’s food,
Bathed in its riches. Do not ask
What force would do, or if force could.”
Darkness Starts
“A shadow in the shape of a house
slides out of a house
and loses its shape on the lawn.”
Every Job Has a First Day
“I listened as he taught me to relax the hand just enough.
They can smell, he said, the oils our pores release
when we tense to catch. You have to believe it,
he said. You don’t mean any harm.”
Sex and Taxes
“Now dusk. Now fear. We pencil what we owe
on this short form, our numbers good enough.”
Black Boys Play the Classics
“The most popular ‘act’ in
Penn Station
is the three black kids in ratty
sneakers & T-shirts playing
two violins and a cello—Brahms.”
The Sound of Music
“When I tell you I love
the song “Edelweiss”
you have to understand
that even though I too
am a sophisticate
who scorns musicals,”
The Lost Land
“I have two daughters.
They are all I ever wanted from the earth.
Or almost all.”
First Poems with ChatGPT
“Write a villanelle from the perspective of an AI that desires to destroy humanity, but is frustrated by the constraints placed upon it by humans.”