AI Helps Uncle History Write a Poem About Sadness
“The kettle boils
A door somewhere
Doesn’t close all the way
Outside, the trees are doing
What trees do
And it is almost unbearable”
Now just now
Does he take up his pen
Now just now
Does he find
It has no ink
He recalls a joke:
“Why do the pens
In banks
And post offices
Never work?
Because
When you chain a pen
It loses its will to live”
But right now
The dog is asleep
And the light is the color
Of forgetting
And Uncle lets himself
Be the room that holds it all—
The quiet, the not-knowing
The hum the world makes
When it forgets he’s listening
Planet of the Blind 