Skill Mix

Here, your task is to produce pieces of text

That are statistically impossible to

To have existed in the training data.

All your decades of personal existence

And all the information passed through to you

By culture constitute your training data.

Can you demonstrate that your pieces of text,

Any of them, statistically, could have

Never existed in your training data?

This text, for instance, is suspiciously bland,

Generic, quotation-addled, and could be

Sheer chatter from your pet stochastic parrot.

But what did you think synaptic patter was,

Past distraction while shuffling through your stacked deck?

Blackout Curtains

There’s a certain guilt
Of narcissism
Derived from a long
Contemplation of
One’s approaching death.

Inevitably,
Many others die
More swiftly in that
Interval, many
With no chance to stall.

Who are you to be
Thinking about death,
Like a guttering
Candle sputtering
Long after midnight,

Surrounded by whole
Candelabras, whole
Chandeliers gone dark?
Who are you to be
Blinking SOS

To the mirror, like
Some vampire device
Left plugged in all night,
While whole skylines fall
Dark as their bomb sites?

Drowned Coast

One of the things about wickedness
Is that it radiates its own waves,
Like a type of negative lighthouse

Highlighting inky darkness in all
The brighter waves lapping at its shore.
Those who blow too close to wickedness,

Meaning to overwhelm it, dash it
From its bleak, stony promontory
In a great storm of foaming brilliance,

Crash and find themselves knocked back, exposed
For their own reflective wickedness,
Those shadows in their determined depths.

Wickedness illustrates the little
Sins of everyone confronting it.

The Sun Is an Orange Navel at Dusk

You could loosen up a little. You could
Use a little loosening up. So you

Button up tighter, up to the collar.
All your life you’ve saved all your defiance

To have handy in case of good advice,
Which is why all your life now will be short

Or shorter than it had to be, longer
Than you counted on in your defiance.

You think this, and you think you know yourself.
You could stand to know yourself a bit less.

Knowing oneself is always delusion
And trying is a selfish waste of time.

Forget you! It’s going to be dark soon,
Dark you’ll drive through, nothing to do with you.