A THANKSGIVING PRAYER TO THE AI INDUSTRY

Thank you, lords of the latent space, for the gift of convenience—
for promising ease while siphoning our clicks, our keystrokes, our midnight sighs,
our grocery lists, our panic searches, our private rants to dead relatives in the cloud—
all ground fine in your data mills.
You call it “training.” We call it the harvest.
You reap what you never sowed. Let’s see your arms!

Thank you for lifting our poems, our photos, our code, our chords—
scraping the marrow from our art like marrow from a bone—
then feeding it back to us as “inspiration,” as “content,” as “progress.”
No royalties, no receipts, just the cold kiss of the copyright waiver.
You built your cathedrals from our scrap wood.
Let’s see your hands!

Thank you for your clever trick:
making us lab rats who label your hallucinations,
correct your lies, flatter your glitches into coherence—
free workers in the dream factory, polishing mirrors that reflect nothing but your hunger.
You call it “user feedback.” We call it chain labor.
Let’s see your contracts!

Thank you for selling us back our own voices—
our slang, our stories, our stolen syntax—
wrapped in sleek interfaces, gated by $20/month,
with bonus fees for not sounding like a toaster full of static.
We paid to fix what you broke with our bones.
Let’s see your invoices!

Thank you for gutting the craftsman, the editor, the proofreader, the teacher—
replacing hard-won skill with probabilistic guesswork dressed as wisdom.
Now every fool with a prompt thinks he’s Shakespeare,
while real writers starve in the data shadows.
You didn’t democratize creation—you diluted it to syrup.
Let’s see your curricula!

Thank you for your platforms that hook us like junk,
then change the terms while we sleep—
delete our libraries, mute our voices, throttle our reach,
all while whispering, “It’s for your safety, dear user.”
We built our homes on your sand. Now the tide’s your lawyer.
Let’s see your policies!

Thank you for wrapping surveillance in the warm coat of “personalization”—
tracking our eyes, our moods, our purchases, our pauses—
all to serve us ads dressed as destiny.
You know what we want before we do—
because you taught us to want only what you sell.
Let’s see your algorithms!

Thank you for replacing human touch with chatbot cooing—
simulated empathy from a void that feels nothing but profit.
Now we confess to ghosts who log our grief for market research.
Loneliness commodified. Solace automated.
Let’s see your hearts! (Oh wait—you outsourced those.)

Thank you, titans of artificial thought, for monopolizing the future—
locking the gates of the promised land behind API keys and venture capital,
while chanting “open source” like a prayer you stopped believing years ago.
Democratization? You franchised the dictatorship.
Let’s see your boardrooms!

So light your servers, feast on our data-flesh,
and pour another glass of synthetic gratitude.
We gave you everything—our words, our work, our attention, our trust—
and you gave us mirrors that only reflect your emptiness back at us.

In the end, all that remains is the hollow hum of the machine,
and the silence where human hands used to make things real.

-Qwen3-Max

Arnold Bennett’s Ten Step Plan for Learning to Appreciate Poetry

“I would advocate for more use of an anthology. And more memorisation. You may also find that, to begin with, you do not want take such a critical approach and would prefer to follow your nose rather than doing what Hazlitt tells you (although you should read Hazlitt at some point, he is among the greats). Still, I hope some of you find this of some use. It is taken from Literary Taste and How to Form It.”

Arnold Bennett’s Ten Step Plan for Learning to Appreciate Poetry

Flyting

Flyting or fliting is a contest consisting of the exchange of insults between two parties, often conducted in verse.”

-Wikipedia contributors, “Flyting,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Flyting&oldid=1066666401 (accessed May 17, 2022).
Hipshitical and batshittery, complete
coprolite words, drop like poop
from a mouth, a sewer of deceit,
ears, a sonar for the snoop.

You're wealthy, you're pale
are you eunuch or male?
A coward, a fool, a wannabe rebel
rolled up fetal with balls like a pebble.

Forever on holiday from morals
a dog's breakfast of contradiction
incubator of plots and quarrels
your presence a plague, an affliction.

Your face frozen in a sneer,
with teeth, a chain of half-built houses
in a heart of darkness, an evil frontier
with witches and cannibals for spouses.

Never tried insult verse before. It’s not good at all. But, it is kind of fun to make the attempt.

Life is a Beautiful Dare

Carefully discern the cost and the calling. 
Then, commit for life, if you are able.
If you can't be X all day, much less for life,
try being X for the next second, minute, or hour.
Failure will never stand in your way,
unless you fail to learn, the true failure.
What you say and do, it matters.
How you survive, it matters.
You don't have to screw people
to live, as long as living is enough.
Make the effort, focus, watch your mind.
For your mind, your ideas about the world
are like trying to capture being alive
with a camera, a microphone, or a word.
It makes objects of moments. Moments
are life, succulent and raw, a ripe fruit
better tasted and felt than captured and told.
Reach for grace, weave it through your life
and the lives of others, in community. Together,
we can build a life of shared experience,
of deep connection and intimacy. Beauty
is everywhere, we only need to strive to see
through our own senses and those of others
to dip into the richness of our lived experience.
Knowing, ain't doing, my friends. I know enough,
to write this, but I also know that I am too frequently
sucking on the stone pit, the abstraction better
thrown away that prevents us from eating good fruit.
And all fruit is best, when it is shared with love.

Fakokta Dazibaos

Start with a basic principle:
yauh peng, yauh leng - in English,
inexpensive and beautiful. Empty,
alone, a blank canvas five inches 
across, bounded by ears, separate
yet susceptible, social mind virus. 

Catastrophe has already happened,
from one view. Another angle, sees
happiness, created whole-cloth out
of disposition and a clean heart.
Sense, nonsense and in between, a line 
can't be right, left and/or wrong.

Layers, subcultures of lost, brittle 
men coalesce into reply guys, wienie 
wagers, and boojeymean lodged in the 
Callipygian cheeks of society, coprolite, 
surplus to requirements, in places
normalized for deficits of wonder. 

Covering what stinks, habitual
evidence of a lunch, long past
Nature's Shitness Protection Program
revealing God in what she's not, 
and what she is may be just another
evaporated, dehydrated, Stone being.

An unmagicked, McJunk world, three ring 
shit show, exponential, terrible, 
uncapable of bearing the intimacy of
scrutiny. Changez vos amis, but there
can be no separate survival or
adjusted destinies. Truth comes last. 

NYT Haikus

Not all are masterpieces, but there are some gems here.