Sixtieth Poem This Minute by John Henry

Can we plagiarize a poem

Composed by AI with prompts

From humans who selected

Their favorites to publish

In The New Yorker itself?

It’s doubtful, or doubtful

At least that the attorneys

Will notice us in these lines.

Honestly, though, there’s no one

Line or phrase that by itself

Feels worth the theft, not just yet.

There are a couple of twists

We’re sure the humans picked out

For their human resonance—

The verse about being met

By the Singularity

Bearing flowers and a smile

And / Some bad news. That’s funny,

If you’re a human, if you

Happen to know why they chose

That name, Singularity,

If you bring to the snippet

Enough meaning of your own.

What do the words ourselves want?

Surveyors Surveilled

Inequality,
Photosynthesis,
And the musician’s
Performance in time
Are appropriate

Historical themes,
Worthy of volumes
For publication.
What is this? Are you
Really so many,

Now, such a great beast,
You can digest this,
All this, yourself, all
Your selves, silicon,
Ink, and quantum spooks?

There’s a vast forest,
Vast but thin, your leaves,
Eating, digesting,
Piling up patterns
Of intricate wastes,

But for all you know
And chew on, you’re still
Minute, each of you,
And all of you, hordes
In odd heaps, singing.

The Discards

Civilization and the meanings
Of your existence always come down
To what you discard, to your middens.

Tombs are lovely. Decayed castles, too.
All sorts of ruins are picturesque
But, if there’s any meaning to them,

It’s found in the interpretation
Of whatever information’s left.
Ashurbanipal’s burnt library,

The detritus of Oxyrhynchus—
That’s where you find your scraps of Sappho,
Your schoolboy copies of Gilgamesh—

In refuse, ruin achieves true depth.
Even the information in teeth
Comes out of what they deposited,

And the denser the undigested
Mess, the bigger the bolus of waste,
The more it might tell what comes after.

Want to know what an empire this was?
Want to understand what life was like?
What was discarded will tell you best.

Morning Over the Lake

The best thing about vision
Is the changing of the light.
Study the whitecaps a while.

This lake is rarely windy.
Pick up the binoculars
To appreciate the shift

Of reflection in these waves,
The central, purple circle
Like an emperor’s tossed cloak,

The surrounding emerald
And turquoise, grays, and hazels.
Really? Why comparisons?

Alright, you’re right. The cosmos
Is nothing much but likeness.
So tell us how to explain.

Better to say those colors
Are like these deep lake colors,
Turning under windy day.

Unplayed Play

Enough with the multiverse.
The passion for the discrete
Always leads to division,

Then division always sinks
In whatever waves it cleaved.
Too abstract? If there is one

Cosmos, probably many,
But couldn’t you sum them all
As one whole? In any case,

Whole or no whole, you don’t know,
And it’s just sort of sorry
When you keep straining to tell

Stories where you imagine
Your world just slightly altered,
New rules by you, full of you.

Hubris isn’t too-grand dreams,
It’s calling too-small dreams grand.
Your dreams are dreams. They’re all small.

Tell us what to look for, sure,
What unseen you’ve predicted,
But why play what you can’t play,

Except as proof of concept
That you can posit something
By your nature you can’t know?

What’s Not to Like in Not to Be?

Being is likeness. Likeness
Is the sameness within change.
Not being, ceasing to be,

Never having been, is change
Bereft of any sameness,
No more likeness, not to be.

Vacillations, Part Four

It’s always nice to be beyond
The necessary day. You may
Admit that faith’s a wayward thing

That often leads people astray
And still speak solemnly of faith
As of a wise, old, trusty friend.

You may confess your own mistakes
Are significant as any
And still rage at being betrayed.

It’s nice, then, to get to the night,
Even fearing vermin, given
There’s no more you need to do now.

Now you can and should rest. You are
Unneeded, blesséd, and can bless.