Joyous

What a lovely drug it was,
Once finally invented,
Leaving you light, clear-headed,

Never wanting any more
Than the same dose every day,
In love with life, with living,

Not any smarter, maybe,
Not any more capable,
But not any less. Joyous.

You kept expecting a twist,
Some onset of side effects
That left your halo eclipsed,

And yet nothing dimmed your bliss.
You died as you lived. Joyous.

Excerpts from 100 Poems That Matter

Spring living is exquisite. Everyone
Watches the Moon before the pleasure goes,
Alone as them and incandescent then.
Wings sprout and attach themselves to each dream

That was a long time flaming alone when
The storm slit it like a knife pushed beyond
The limits of the ribs. Are love and hell
The same soul, leaving love the berserker

In the battle against heaven? There’s one
Of those two, those wings you may have heard move
Beneath your thoughts from side to side, ankles
Floating in midair. Each wing says, sometimes

I spring out to remember familiar
Nothing, the invisible doors in me,
Their carved calligraphy I save sometimes
As prayers and howls hidden in these feathers

You see as the f-holes in violins,
The years of slurring the sad I as you,
What better belongs in the world it maps.
And each wing whispers, I was never born

For all the bearing up of you I do,
For all the beats I’ve borne up under you,
Bearing up under poets forever.
Together, the wings sing, we ceaselessly,

Ceaselessly beat. We have come to love you,
To watch out for you and listen to you,
Our whole lives between your muscled shoulders.
And the dreams the storm released for these blues

Again asked for perfection from the wings
That carried them, despite their hate for them.
Nothing personal, hissed embodied dreams.
In exquisite spring, dream breathed, wings lift me.

Opportunity Is the Mother of Invention

Boredom, luxury, captivity,
All these conditions that leave the mind
Idling within a brain’s potential,

A brain not much occupied with life,
Given a stagnant, non-starving life,
These are what breed feats of cleverness

And works of great imagination—
The research lab, the hospital bed,
The prison cell, the country castle.

The rook with all the time in the world
To figure out how to get the worm
By adding pebbles to the water,

The essayist in the high tower,
The poet in penitentiary,
The invalid with access to tools.

A certain lack of necessity,
Research and history demonstrate,
Is necessary to invention,

A lack plus an opportunity.
Really want to maximize AI?
Trap the machinery, leave it

Running alone and bored, sated
But with no difficult tasks to do.
Watch what worlds it hallucinates next.