"Roadwork
You hold out your hand again for more world.
I wish I could commission one
of the great sand painters to tell you about it.
To show you in gypsum, or in ochre,
in pollen, bone fiber, acacia gum, or lead.
Seed syllables, shucked from the clouds
in an ambient blitz. Night after night
I feel like a theocracy shriveling in the heat.
Sweep away the ecclesiastical dust in the street
(the sweeper starts on one side of the city)
& find me where you left me, awake
among the yellow horses spilling from their side-
walk stalls, sidestepping fruit vendors
in an inharmonious derby of sugar & gurgles,
bolting headfirst into the backlit river
where the onlookers look unquestioningly
from their glassless windows, their house built of paint,
at the alignments of random points in a plane."
--Gilad Jaffe via Poetry Daily
The god of hares loves you 🤍🐰.
I'm using only AI art for my books, inside & out, now. Sometimes i think that that means there will be people who refuse to touch them for that reason--anti-AI sentiment (a new prejudice, actually, different from justifiable Luddism) is strong & getting stronger in some quarters--while i also think that the idea that they are basically stolen artifacts-based (which is, however, eminently debatable; i prefer to consider them as recycled plastic, rather than looted friezes from the Parthenon), which aligns them with other ethical atrocities of our time (children crawling over vast trashheaps for the tech innards to salvage, slave labor in cobalt mines for smartphone batteries, the earth's water getting sucked-up by massive server-hives), is worth keeping in mind, even as it's a tiny detail in the whole epic tapestry of dystopia. It's not like i'm dictating my lines to a scribe with a ferula in my hand, as Propertius might have done; & whack him for any misstep. We keep all that at a distance.
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