Every textbook read
Teaches us to take pride in your graft
Live for you and we can eat
And hope a few survive as children
They'll endure by tooth and claw
The world is yours, the anthem sings
Said bring you the bread
Clock in clock out pray to the calf
It's dishonorable to cheat
My blood becomes your billions
Your bloody hands stain every vault
All is yours but we have dreams
But guess what we got you instead
Don't bother dodging simple math
All for one was bare deceit
There's one of you, but we are millions
The blade is clean, and sharp, and broad
We'll only keep a headless king.
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Dead Labor
We added the artisans first.
Then came the drudges working the assembly lines.
The farmers, or their laborers, at least, were also mixed in.
No one really wants to know how the sausage is made.
The computers were integrated.
Their astronaut wards processed beside them.
And now we've found a way
To dig up the artists, writers, musicians, and dancers, the builders and thinkers
And feed them to the corpse machine
We asked ChatGPT to write a poem called "Dead Labor"
And called it a "corpse machine."
It returned an awful poem:
Too declarative. No pulse. Generic and clichéd. No tension. Flatly moralistic.
Perhaps, if we feed it enough corpses, it will get better.
I fed myself to the corpse machine
And it returned a corpse.
Button
I haven’t wanted to ask this.
I’ve been afraid asking would be the end of our relationship.
But I’ve already wasted so much time and energy trying to figure out if
I imagined our connection—if
I’m imagining the disconnection.
Reality is hard to grasp through mania and depression,
Every crumb of attention starts the cycle over.
The truth is, our relationship ended a long time ago.
I just hadn’t figured it out until recently.
What exists now is two people who used to know each other,
Being friendly from time to time.
So what is there to be afraid of?
I’ve spent a lot of time replaying our conversations,
Trying to understand when things changed.
I am profoundly wounded that you couldn’t say, “Something’s happened. I need space.”
A friend would have said, “This isn’t working.
You need to work on this.”
So I need to know if we're friends.
What happened?
Why did things change?
Sophistry and Solipsism in the New Millennium 