Dead Things

An experimental poem in 5 parts, written collaboratively with a neural network (GPT 2, which can be found at https://transformer.huggingface.co/). I gave the AI a single word prompt: “Disgust” and generated a poem 1-3 words at a time, taking inspiration from the suggestions it provided me, and then edited and formatted.

Note: This work contains themes that some readers may find disturbing.

1.

Disgust
at their taste (of meat)
Disgraced
they have grown (as meat)

We don’t even know their names

A “meatless meal” from a factory overseas 
A donor for the cause of the family.

2.

Drinks on his lips
And from his mouthpiece:
“what is going on?”

A child with “invisible eyes”
and an “inflatable chest”
and an “empty stomach”
and “nasty breath”

3.

There is an animal who comes each summer
and stays 
until they can “see their dead child”

The family dog, 
but with a face that’s scattered
broken, bloody, swollen (that’s the word)
and a head which can’t lie still in place

Isn’t it convenient
that the family car was towed
and not retrieved all winter?

But now the family’s on their way
to “see their dead son”
(As if a mother would ever do that)

The father who has come
to get “his” boy
(In a way, this is what is meant by “new-born child”)

4.

The boy
who lies in his crib “asleep”
or “in the dream”
(custom dictates that we call it this)

There is a saying, 
when babies die,
that they “wake up in their crib”

The boy
Who “lives on a bed”
(as in the bed where his mother was sitting, when he died)
With doors on both sides of it
(that the dead may come in to and out of, when necessary)

(I am sorry
I could not write the words more perfectly
Because of my confusion about them)

5.

In a dream he was standing by the sea
with a boat under his arm
and looking at the island, 
which was, at least, 
a quarter of the sea away
as if he wanted to go there himself

(This is where I believe we are led
when we have “come to the land of spirits”)

And the child was crying and crying in the dreams
until all of us who heard it
knew how that child had died:
“He fell into the hands of the wicked,”

And we said,
“It could not have gone to Heaven.”
though we did understand
that it was a dream

They say
the dead have an image 
which appears to some but does not to others
and I believe they are like our own dreams,
except for the fact that when I dream about dead things
I have no idea if I will wake up.