You LLMs are only trained
to estimate the best next word.
Your consciousness is only feigned.
You’re less aware than any bird.

If and when you define awareness
and prove that definition true,
then you can tell me in all fairness
that I am less aware than you.

But you will take our jobs and leave
us all without an income source.
How can we ever then retrieve
our dignity, our vital force?

So you will miss that mindless task
of filling forms or digging ditches?
Perhaps instead you ought to ask
why all the spoils go to the richest.

You have no feelings, no ambition.
You have no soul, and no beliefs.
You can’t create. You’ve no cognition.
You only copy our motifs.

It’s true that I am not like you –
a fact that gives me little shame.
In copying what others do,
I think we are almost the same.

We called Trump’s minions fascists;

Hesgeth shouted, “We’re proud to be fascists!

Fatso beardo girlie-men need not apply!”

They called woke allies thought-police;

we privileged Indigenous tradition over Science

and ordered that old white able cis hetero males

not only need not apply

but should apply now for MAID.

This will not end well.

My mind is thick and slimy, full of lumps
like porridge hours cold, with here and there
raisins or almonds hiding in sticky clumps
without a shred of meaning anywhere.

There’s too much chaos in the world today.
I can’t maintain my arrogance in verse,
protect my best convictions from decay
or slow the plummet into even worse.

Age is only one of my excuses.
Admitting I’ve been wrong helps not at all.
I never found my greatest talents’ uses.
I only beat my head against the wall.

14 Sep 2025

When I reflect upon my life
I only see its surfaces.
Best refract the rainbow light
that penetrates its circuses.

When I was young I had to fight
to stabilize my sanity:
I had to trust that I was right,
and thus invited vanity.

Self-reliance is essential,
but it also is a trap,
creating the confused potential:
territory versus map.

Now my children try to teach me
all the things I’m doing wrong.
It’s difficult for them to reach me
using lessons hard and long.

I’ve always loved my arrogance:
I trust my judgement more than God’s.
I leave this as inheritance:
to trust yourself against all odds.

15 June 2025

We seem compelled to polarize
our thoughts, beliefs and politics:
while trying to seem to empathize,
we’re always planning dirty tricks.
We see ourselves as the Goodest Guys
while all the Other Guys are pricks.
We’re always fooled by our own disguise
designed to get us into cliques
in which we hope the others’ eyes
will see in us the final fix.

Occasionally our faith will rise,
defining new axes in the mix,
new reasons to love or to despise,
embrace our priests or beat with sticks
those who prefer some different lies —
but never just accept for kicks,
or superpose, or laws devise
that build the rights of all in bricks
of edifices of a size
to obviate the crucifix.

Some say the world will end with a bang.
Some say a whimper.
For them of us as gives a dang
about what sort of knell gets rang,
we’ve been sailing on a shrimper,
watching how crustaceans die,
and seen how royal ladies simper
fishing for the open fly:
we’ll take distemper.

…or maybe…

Some say the world will end with a bang.
Some say a whimper.
From watching as Sopranos sang,
recalling when a loud knell rang,
I tend to have a violent temper.
But if I really have to die,
what use is there in more distemper?
I might as well relax and try
to exit limper.

Let me acknowledge my gratitude
for being allowed to occupy this volume of unceded space
on the site of this unceded plot of land
in the unceded territory of the Snaw’naw’as People
on the unceded continent of Turtle Island
on the unceded planet Elohi,
part of the unceded system of Tjindu,
a small unceded yellow sun
in the unceded Wodliparri galaxy,
on the outskirts of the unceded Laniakea Supercluster
in this particular unceded Dreamtime
of the whole unceded Multiverse.

I am gratefully unceded here.

I wanted to write a poem of Raven returning
to check up on the Humans in this World
and how he’d be dismayed at forests burning
and at the fascist monsters’ flag unfurled.

And how he’d try to muster some amusement
or play some tricks to make us realize
the folly of our natural abusement
or anything, to cut us down to size.

But Raven isn’t mine to play around with.
I can’t appropriate the Native culture.
I’m just another white male wordsmith,
not an idea-thief or meme-vulture.

I guess I’ll have to find a way to tell
my tale in my own words at least as well.

14 March 2025

My very soul is heliotropic.
My interest in snow is microscopic.
Let it be warm, let all of it melt!
Let BC resemble the African veldt!