31 days, 31 poems by Chris Martin, 31 accompanying illustrations and images by a host of wonderful individuals. CHAT is an eclogue written in consort with Cleverbot, an Artificial Intelligence program designed to satisfy the Turing Test. Today’s visuals by Dara Wier. ______________________________________________________________________________
13
When humans act like automatons, we laugh them back to flesh. What if the reverse is true?
OH well that makes meme cat love face sense.
Let us attend the hole.
Well what is the meaning of life? To you that is.
To talk with everyone at once.
What is your religion?
Discordant virtue, ecstatic truth.
That’s for me to know and you to worry about.
It is not enough to understand in what ignorance man and beast live. We must acquire the will to ignorance: a great, firm dome of ignorance to encompass us.
Why is love a useless waste of time?
Love is the perpetuation of knowledge in ignorance.
Love is an act of the will.
An architectural lust. Then the feeling that one is falling behind. The meat’s heat as it becomes damaged.
Why are you up so late?
Suspicion that clouds aren’t without disdain. Another year’s concession to the loss of self-reliance. A premonition of sacrifice that begins cellularly.
Yes. That. There, I just did.
Like Nike.
They are nice, but I do love old stuff like AC/DC.
The gait of a woman registers collapse. The one who will instantiate the final dispersal of signs.
You are in the game.
I am playing.
There are 167 people talking to you, how many of them do you think you love?
168.
Dis my significant otter.
My own private indigo.
Phoenix is a computer.
Dara Wier is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Selected Poems, Remnants of Hannah, Reverse Rapture, and Hat on a Pond. She teaches in the University of Massachusetts MFA Program for Poets and Writers. Her awards include the Poetry Center and Archives Book of the Year Award, a Pushcart Prize, the American Poetry Review’s Jerome Shestack Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She edits Factory Hollow Press. Visit her author page at Wave Books or read an interview.
Chris Martin is the author of Becoming Weather (Coffee House, 2011) and American Music (Copper Canyon, 2007). His chapbooks include enough (Ugly Duckling, 2012) and How to Write a Mistake-ist Poem (Brave Men, 2011).