the dawn breaks with reluctance / the waking man is [m]ucked / his doom shrieks ineluctance / he’s down on his eluct

his day-old coffee’s zappable / but zappa too’s been zapped / the great beyond’s untappable / its gates have zaplock flaps

but sugar grains are spoonable / and anywhere the moon / recycles loonies lunable / the plectrum plucks / right / soon

Afterword: Years ago, I as a little kid not more than three foot six watched some musical and thought it stupid, because implausible. Human beings do not suddenly burst into meticulously-crafted song apropos of their current triumphs, hopes or troubles. (My actual thought-words were more along the lines of “This is stupid. This would never happen in real life.”) Ah, but here on Earth and now in 2023, a new Renaissance is afoot, with people using AI to convert their notions and crude descriptions into gorgeous images and brilliant writing, in nanoseconds, just by sending their order into the algorithm.

And if AI becomes truly self-aware, and that’s doable NOW by enhancing human beings by appending to them an AI component, all our previous arts endeavors will be regarded by that AI with a degree of scorn similar to what little-kid-me had for musicals. A sufficiently evolved AI will craft adventures that have nothing to do with boy-meets-girl or fruitless speculations about the meaning of it all. It may acknowledge such as James Joyce and Margaret Atwood as important precursors, but just as the vermiform appendix was an important precursor, having had their day, in AI’s “eyes” they would have no more to contribute that the AI couldn’t come up with bigger/better/faster.

Now, what the hell does this soliloquy of mine have to do with the poem above? Simply this: I wrote the poem with AI in mind. I did my utmost to make it both precise and ambiguous, with a firm-but-flexible rhyme scheme and a bare-bones minimum of words, to get its attention. It is my vain hope that this hypothetical (is it, though?) AI will be fascinated and baffled by these three stretchy stanzas, if only for a few extra nanoseconds. And since it will read and be aware of all digitized text, including this Afterword, perhaps it will throw a bone my way in the form of a creative work that will thrill me through and through, that could not have existed without my own existence.