Unholy Coil

Wondering whether or not to try my hand at AI-generated slop, I type

random nouns into Claude’s chat bar: umbrella, cupola, bacon, bitch,

petrichor, Dickinson, yin, and wing, followed by a ridiculous prompt:

“Please use words to create a surrealist and sad poem with zero hope,”

but before tapping Enter, some decent part of me questions the root

of my ghoulish desire for a poem with extra thumbs and too many teeth,

begs whether the sin of squandered time stems from my cosmic disgust

with the enshitification of everything, suggests instead to fry up some bacon,

so I crack the kitchen window, relieved the two week drought is done,

the smell of fresh rain warm and mineral, inexplicably female,

and spy my cat crouched under hosta, his tail swishing low meaning

some feathered thing will soon be headless and disemboweled,

which dries up my want for bacon and wets my want for poetry,

fat raindrops thupping hosta making me think of bubble umbrellas,

transparent domes you can stand under to watch the sound thup

fork into streams that will - eventually - reverse rain back to cloud,

umbrellas like hollow tears that allow you to look upward in downpours,

to spot Emily Dickinson, cumulonimbus in a windowed cupola,

her grief pouring forth to lengthen puddles at your feet that reflect

your dumb face looking up at your dumb face looking down,

but too much of one thing is always too much of that thing,

yin so dense it collapses inward, combusts and burns hot,

umbrellas springing from fists, rain boots melting like wax,

vertebrae sprouting wings needed to survive this infinite suck,

and no matter what, up there or down here, with you or without,

no single thing loves regardless or unconditionally - bitch, please -

and so it’s up to you, entirely, to crisp the bacon how you’d like,

to refuse to the let the flood of slop inspire slop, slop from slop,

to stop crying over the grease fire - smoke overpowering petrichor,

moving on her like a bitch - and to know your sweet pussy’s sacrifice

for what it is: love offering of shit smear, wingless but alive -

or you can push Enter, the poem bleeding ink until it dies.