I wanted to see what AI could do in terms of writing a song. Here is the prompt and the result. (The first one is AI. The second one is me. It’s probably a tie.)
Prompt: Write a classic rock song about a retiree’s narrow life in a universe that expands infinitely.
Verse 1:
Woke up one morning, feeling so darn old
Got aches in my bones, my story’s been told
Been livin’ life in the slow lane, same old song
Watching the world fly by, feels like I don’t belong
Chorus:
In a universe that’s ever expanding
My life seems so narrow, suffocating
Gotta find a way to break free, to fly
Before my time’s up and the whole world passes by
Verse 2:
I’ve been stuck in this rut for far too long
Wasting my days in a routine floatin’ on
But the universe out there is vast and grand
And life’s too short not to make a stand
Chorus:
Bridge:
I may be getting old, but my spirit’s still young
With the fire in my soul, I can’t be outdone
Gonna take that leap of faith, spread my wings and fly
In the face of a universe that refuses to die
Chorus:
Then I watched Monty Python’s video The Galaxy Song and this happened.
Banging and Crunching
(Since You’ve Been Gone)
Verse:
I’m a 73 year old retiree.
I spend my day primarily making tea (and pee)
Though there’s no one here with whom I converse,
I’m the center of the expanding universe.
We’re a hundred miles apart since that day
Three years ago when you went away, (far away)
Like drinking good cognac,and hiking up a track,
Getting gone takes less time than getting back.(that’s a fact)
Bridge:
The math is undeniable, Sweetheart.
Since you left we’ve drifted far too far apart
Verse:
Einstein’s Relativity cleared the path.
Hubble marked the signposts in his math. (so much math)
It’s not that everything flies away.
It’s the space itself expanding every way.
From right to left to up to down to back
You are speeding out away into the black.
From my front to to your front, however, dear,
A red shift is apparent, seen from here. (It’s clear.)
Bridge:
My only hope is to see the start of the Big Crunch
In a 100 million years or so we can shout and wave a bunch
Verse:
I’ve done some calculations on the cuff (off the cuff!)
To see if this distance is enough
At 42 miles a second per megaparsec,
And under this much gravity—double check— (what the heck)
The father away, the faster you recede
The longer gone, the greater is your speed.
Like raisins in the rising raisin dough,
We’re sitting still all while we’re on the go. (Sooooooooo)
Bridge:
I’m rooting for the Big Crunch I’ll wait right here for you
And in a billion years or so, you’ll be right here with me too.
Until the Big Crunch I’ll wait right here for you
And in a billion years or so, you’ll be right here with me too.
(90)
Beer Drinking and Deep Thinking
I sit with my deep thoughts while I’m drinking.
No need for any friends to interrupt.
A pop top on a beer can starts me thinking—
Like what went down and now what is up?
A beer can change your mind if you let it.
Two beers can erase a joyless frown.
Three beers can often help forget it.
(1) Four can make you howl like a hound.
(2) Four makes everything go out of round.
(3) Four can make it easy to fall down.
Sometimes I have a beer and sit, just thinking.
I often think deeper most the day.
I think about life and how I end up blinking
At how it all turned out this-a-way.
If you don’t think it through on the first one
A second or a third may help a bit
By 4 or 5 or 6 you’re having some fun
By 7 you’re just a drunken shit.
Refrain
I’ve found there is truth in a beer can
But it takes a lot of time to get it out.
You can’t chug a thought like a keg stand.
You have to sit and struggle with the doubt.
Did I do the things that I shoulda ought to?
Or did I just waste a lot of days?
If I could get to do all this stuff over
Would I just end up old anyway?
[89]
Dr. Hook Audition Tape
Yesterday, I confessed how, in a fantasy, I wished I could go back in time and do whatever was necessary to join Dr. Hook and The Medicine Show. This is my audition tape, based on that famous line of theirs.
You make my pants want to get up and dance,
You make my socks rock and roll.
You make my shirt want to stand up and blurt
How much I love your voice and soul.
You make my belt feel all it felt
You make my hair fall down
You make my face, beam into space
And all my other parts run around.
I’ve been feeling down, since you’re not around.
No happy smiles are on my lips.
I wander through town, wearing a frown.
There ain’t no swing in my hips.
When you come back home and I’m not alone
My heart just beats like a band.
I’m not the same when I whisper your name.
Honey child, I’m your biggest fan.
You make my pants want to get up and dance,
You make my socks rock and roll.
You make my shirt want to stand up and blurt
How much I love your voice and soul.
You make my belt feel all it felt
You make my hair fall down
You make my face, beam into space
And all my other parts run around.
[88]
Chronic Pain
When you wake
It is sitting on the edge of your bed,
Waiting to be put on
Like a new suit of clothes.
It is too small.
It chafes at your neck
And pinches at your waist.
It shrink wraps itself
To your joints,
Stiffening your gate,
Chaining your hands and feet,
Wrists and ankles
Knees and elbows.
It has enough electrical charge
To freeze an appendage
And force the involuntary utterances:
Oh,
Ow,
God damn, for example.
It is small like electrons
Racing up neural pathways to the brain,
Always leaving damage in the synovial joints.
It is as wide as the sky
Filled with tumbling lightning,
Rolling and rolling through tangles of nerves.
It travels with you
To the bathroom.
Will your knees get you there in time?
Will your arms reach yourself
In the bath?
Will fingers hold out long enough
To rinse your hair?
To trim your beard?
To hold your toothbrush?
The warm water helps.
Eventually you must negotiate
The cold.
You towel off where you can reach,
Contort into real world clothes.
Begin your day.
But one day you cannot sustain the defenses.
You let it pierce you
And you cry and stamp your feet
Like a six year old
Who keeps wetting the bed
And who wants his mama
To make it stop,
Only Mama is dead
And the pain doesn’t care.
It throbs with your pulse
In bones
And joints
And synovial tissues.
It pierces
Then overfloods.
It seeps out of your bones
And it flies in your hair
And sets your scalp on fire.
Your knees ache
But your shoulder pain is sharp.
Your elbow locks
When raw bones clash
Like broken gears in a broken clock.
Your hip grates,
Grinding something down
That bleeds and erodes.
And you gnash teeth,
Gird loins
and you ignore it
And ignore it
And ignore it.
But eventually you understand:
It is not your pain.
You do not own it;
It owns you.
You are its reason for being.
It is your possessive lover
And it hurts you where no other may touch.
It is intimate
When it electrifies your nerve gardens.
Its fingers pry and dig.
It seeps salty vinegar into open wounds.
So you and your lover
Face your day with new understandings.
It is a jealous lover
And you dread meeting new people
With firm handshakes.
You give up any intimacy with tools.
Hammers may as well be cattle prods.
Rakes and shovels become abstracts
Hanging on your garage wall.
Even books are too heavy for your wrists.
Instead you begin a new study of drugs.
Your days get measured out in pills:
The morning pills, not coffee.
The afternoon pills, not lunch,
Maybe some weed.
The evening pills.
And you offer more changes for your lover:
You drink less
Or you drink more,
Some drink a lot more.
Each day is measured in organ capacity.
Will too many pills kill your kidneys?
Some days you root for liver failure.
You begin to understand the Oxy crisis.
Finally, it is bedtime.
Your lover crawls in with you
Wrapping you up in
Child-sized flannel pajamas
On flannel sheets.
They grip in your crotch,
Pinch in your groin,
Squeeze your chest
And armpits.
Lying still hurts.
Turning over hurts.
No pillow fits your neck.
No quilt lies easy.
You curl, feeling close to Heaven,
Still outside the gates.
You lie there a long time.
Eventually gray light seeps through the window.
You see the figure on the side of the bed.
[87]
On the Wall
The original idea was to carve a relief block to make a print. I had this image of cave art in my head but couldn’t find a way to realize it. I adapted some images into a design for a block for printing. The original plan was to overlay two blocks as though an early cave painter had made one image and the space was subsequently commandeered by another artist. Such things happened in the “way back” times. But no matter what I did the images generated by this block were horrible as prints. The images were too stark. There was little context. I set the project aside until I could figure a different way to do what I was trying to do.
The block sat on my workbench for days…then weeks. But it didn’t go away. And then suddenly, I realized, this was already the project. It is now a painting-slash-sculpture-slash-bas relief. I like it even better than the original idea. I will mount it on a piece of cherry plywood and frame it. Lemons and lemonade. (Carved and painted plywood, 8″x10″)
[86]
Creatio ex nihilo
Before a thing exists, we don’t know it’s a thing.
Before radio, we didn’t know what radio was.
Before TV,
Before atomic bombs,
Before rockets,
Before me.
After a thing exists we know it’s a thing.
We know what made the thing
and we can name it:
a ram jet makes sonic booms,
CO2 makes global warming,
my mom + dad makes me
(it is an uneven task).
It’s when we keep going backwards,
that things get awkward.
What made mom + dad?
What made a ram jet?
What made CO2?
Eventually we must ask:
Is there a time before everything?
Before steel?
Before carbon?
Before atoms?
Before matter and energy?
Abrahamic religions tell us that nomadic desert dwellers
from thousands of years ago
had already asked that question.
Their answer was: God,
YAHWEH.
They found a thing called God
And they named it: YAHWEH.
More precisely, the voice of YAHWEH.
The Word.
God spoke and it all became.
Before that, Babylonians recorded a tale
wherein the great god, Marduk
battled the goddess, Tiamat
and that struggle created the Earth and its people.
Or, specifically, the body of the defeated goddess
is used to make the sky and the earth,
her tears form the great rivers
and her son, (who is also her spouse?)
contributes his blood to make people.
Of course, the story doesn’t tell us
how the warriors and her son,
and all the other gods who were watching
came to be
except they were divided out of other Gods
Before them.
It’s always the same:
Someone or something
has a thought.
He or she, but usually He, speaks
or fights
or commands
the Earth,
or the land and sky,
or the earth and the heavens
to come into existence
and all that follows is called “after.”
Science tells this story too:
In the beginning,
The Universe
(a far larger story, they say)
does not exist.
It is “before.”
It is before time or space or things.
And then something unknown/unknowable happened.
It is named The Big Bang.
We do not know what caused it,
Or what “it” was,
Or where “it” was.
Or when “it” was:
Some scientists say,
“13.787±0.020 billion years as interpreted with the Lamda-CDM concordance mode,”
and a few others say
“A little less according to the background microwave radiation measurements of Plank.”
Howsomever,
All these calculations took place “after.”
And now there are things,
and now there is space,
and now there is time.
All of that happened in a twinkling of an eye.
The story continues today.
This is “now”
and we don’t know what is “after after.”
And we won’t know until…after.
Some say BOOM;
Some say freezing in the dark,
but both leave space and time
And matter lingering.
…unless the clock can tick backward
or runs in circular time.
If that is the case
we are looking for the beginning of a circle.
Modern atheists
(and nihilists),
or even ancient ones, as far as I know,
made their own sounds against that small voice.
“But what of before?”
And
“What of after?”
That voice with that question
does not create anything,
Or at least it hasn’t yet.
Apparently only mythological gods die;
the Earth abides…
until it doesn’t.
[85]
Tankas to ex-lovers
We were young, stupid,
but that thing nagged at us hard.
Your bits were younger,
Mine were virgin, insisting.
I have never forgotten.
[79]
Before you cheated
I was lost in your blue eyes
Liquid pools bouyed me
insulated me from storms
kept the tragedy at bay.
[80]
I see you naked
only in my memory
for these 40 years.
That does not stop me at all.
My fantasy is stubborn.
[81]
That season was hot.
I didn’t have a fan but
We chilled all summer,
rolling in the waterbed
laid out on the concrete floor.
[82]
Do I like tankas?
Well, not particularly.
They feel like haiku
That can not find their endings
like an old Bob Seger song.
[83]
Conditional? Yes!
My love comes with strings:
Puppy, no house poop!
Her love denies boundaries
But she drinks from the toilet.
[84]
Verbless Poems
This started as an experiment on FaceBook.
From Ezra Pound:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
From me:
The dog’s bright eyes in stillness…
The rabbit in silhouette against the snow.
[76]
The owl’s eyes in moonlight
her wings in darkness
her talons in flesh.
[77]
Her illium in moonlight,
a dunescape of grays,
a long rill,
a graceful curve,
a valley in shadow,
my hand in silver.
[78]
March of the Haiku
This spate of haikus comes from a prompt offered from the FaceBook page of friend and bard, Terry Wooten. That’s him in the photo performing at his unique venue, Stone Circle. He wrote:
Bi-polar April.
Peepers singing in snowflakes.
Change lawn mower oil.
(April 18, 2022)
I shared his poem on my FaceBook page with the following comment: “It is a nearly perfect example of the the American Haiku: 5-7-5, presents something funny and/or surprising, it contains nature and makes a comment on humanness. It goes above and beyond by banging two things together that don’t belong together (twice!!) for a little “contrapposto.” I took it as a challenge to write my own April poem. I thought I could take inspiration and match his genius. Not today! I’ll keep trying.”
The rest of the day I continued to put out haiku and some are better than others. I’m not certain any rose to Terry’s level above.
Oh no! I just drank
six gay beers and I liked it.
Please don’t tell my wife.
[68]
Heart doctor gave me
(prostate the size of a peach)
Mass diuretics.
[69]
What makes a haiku?
In America, mostly
Humor and surprise.
[70]
Ski masks make baseball
Look like bank robbing–
Another stolen base.
[71]
It’s hard to see things
If you don’t do anything.
Bad haiku! Bad ‘ku!
[72]
When the sun peeks through
on a snowy April day,
don’t believe the lie.
[73]
A Fox News headline
Is a lie that might happen
In Bizarroland.
[74]
Matter/energy
Cannot be made or destroyed.
Where’d the ice cream go?
[75]
35 years ago I tried to paint
Why save those old canvases?
I guess I thought I might paint over them one day.
The brain that made those images
Was stiff.
No training. Little forethought.
I called them “studies.”
They were more like meditations
Without thought or intent.
The new, older brain becomes more plastic.
I see more potential.
In 35 years I haven’t ended my relationships
With them.
Today I tore them down
And resurfaced them with 400 grit.
I used the zazan frog block
And reprinted him in pthalo green
On 35 year old purple stripes.
He seems to like it there.
Travel well Zazen.
Go visit my grandchildren.
[52] and [53-67]
