the baggy tumbleweeds are now listless across the tarmac

Carried by the death-rattle of god's cluttered trachea

in a crooked civic neck that can crane no longer,
  the baggy post-modern tumbleweeds

  that were spun of the hydrocarbon barb

  and hooked our hands and carried our shopping so conveniently
  for decades and minutes
    now blow listless across the reticent tarmac
    through streets of naïve cement, and down

    down into netherworld gutter grills and sewage river mouths.

Laying thick the plaque and lint
of tomorrow's impossible forever floss,
the sediment of our invented flesh confetti
scleroses in the lining of life's improvised plumbing.

How we heave and marvel at the great hubristic fatbergs
of sloppy pop and engorged engineering. Heave
and marvel at subterranean monuments to failed rebellion,
failed catharsis, failed purgation,
as inadvertent plastic statues sink like Atlantis
under the collapsing gravity of their own production.
Statues that masquerade 

as progress on the goldfish treadmill of ideas and impulsive half-imagination.
We the top feeders. We the litterers,
trying to improve upon the ages of stone and bronze.

And so to the hard mistakes we hold within us:
these immortal particles of wishful thinking,
clogging the free-willed bifurcations of our collective vasculature.
These ubiquitous, crystalline shards

of the Snow Queen's black molding mirror,

that cling to our lung, sporulating wildly,

and whose warped reflections,

make even the loveliest landscapes look like boiled spinach.

And the self-professed heroes of our generation choose 

the microscopic spectacle of clandestine war

and the fleeting gore of a glorious broken-nosed fist fight

that bleeds onto the world like boiling amber.
While terraced batteries of clucking neighbours,
sit in concertinas of chaste little English castles, crumbling
like sand under the risk of precarious capital, or imploding

in the vacuum of absent community, amid circular pecking orders and
the auspices of opportunistic ring leaders,
that parasitose from the pointed comfort of pyramid peaks.

We half-live, with the rippling pectoral threat of the long arm
and the droning remote controlled little blue men,
who fast-track the intoxicated visionaries to the dumpster
and work to force the exploding seeds of searing truth back into their boxes,
containing the madness that rises to the occasion,
when the only way we may make our mark on the world,
is to make scars of ourselves and reject
the endless plugs and sockets and the babbling rubber voices
between our ears, in our heads, planted there by lifeless buds.
Anything but drip-dry-compliance.

With the dust of dirty centuries
still thick in the air, we choke newly
on the opaque decadence of Teflon and Gore-Tex;
juvenile and mythic protectors against earth,
water, wind and fire. We choke
on the ethereal insolvents of perfluorotributylamine
and sulphur hexafluoride, clear as an injury,
and wait for a new hero to arrive with a mop and bucket.
Wait for the angels or the demons to arrive and take us away.
Instead, only the reassuring dead end of mortality
and no conclusion. Not even a full stop.
Not even an altar at which to scream.

And then the plughole says to me
"when all walls are mirrors, the world takes on a kaleidoscopic shape"

more AI poetry

a second attempt with a much better GTP3 interface, this timing using the newly released Chat-GTP

using the prompt, can you write a rhyming poem about the creative process of writing poetry itself?

As I sit and think and ponder,
I let my thoughts just wander.
I search for words that sound just right,
To craft a poem that takes flight.

I play with rhyme and meter too,
To give my words a musical hue.
I edit and revise, again and again,
Until my poem takes shape and then.

With each stroke of the pen,
I bring my thoughts to life within.
A jumble of words and phrases,
Transformed into a work of art that amazes.

The creative process may be slow,
But the end result is worth the toil.
A poem that sings and dances,
A treasure that will last for ages.

...getting better. will soon experiment with half written poems and seeing if it can finish them in the same style

update: ...no, it's fucking abysmal. best you can do is come up with a ridiculous premise and ask for something in that vein because then the surreality of the premise becomes the entertainment, whereas the execution is always utterly derivative, as you'd expect, being trained on the world`s text, which reduce to an average. the best you can hope for is a numbers game where you put enough weird shit into it and keep it generating and iterating and it occasionally churns out an "original" turn of phrase by chance.

parasite

the worst bit about parasites is that they become part of us. they get inside and it becomes difficult to get them out without taking a part of ourselves with them, leading to a strange and awful combination of loss aversion that makes you hesitant to tear them out, and self-alienation that makes you feel less like yourself. when an enemy has got inside, there's always sacrifice, whether you have to cut out a hunk of your flesh or scorch part of your home. parasites also tend to evade detection; to camouflage, confuse and hide. sometimes they permanently become part of you. did you know, roughly 10% of our DNA is viral? from hundreds of millions of years of co-evolution with animals, little remnants that migrated into our genes and managed to stay.

There was a time i was full of parasites...

The bugs in my bed,
they would come out at night,
get under the sheets with me
and sup from my blood,
while i dreamt of drowning 
in a crunchy sea of little exoskeletons.
So i didn't sleep.

The bugs in my dick,
they would lie and wait
until i was weak
and then they'd come out
just under the frenulum, like an evil flower
and make me afraid to ever touch again,
to ever reach out, to even start talking.

So i resigned myself to always be alone.

The bugs in my ear,

they had banged too hard and degraded my drum,

so the surgeon had to throw it away

and fashion one new from some nearby material,

but i knew beyond doubt that the bugs were still there,
waiting for weakness
to come round again.

The surgery had failed.
So i stopped listening.

The bug in my heart,
it had worn through my spirit

after years of loving; chronically and terminally,
this parasitoid that yearned for me so,
and wanted - demanded - that i stay, stay, stay,
when more than anything i needed to be free.

But the bug had connived such complete menticide,

manipulating my mind beyond authenticity and self-preservation,
to the point of dishonesty and self-deception.
So i dug my heels in deeper.

The bugs in my brain,
they'd scuttle round the gyri and sulci of my cortex,
while i lay in bed till the late afternoon,
and re-mind me of how paralysed i was.
"yes, you're trapped", they'd say, over and over
"and how are you going to get out?"
"i don't know", i'd say, wanting it all to just melt away
"we know a way", they'd say.
So i made some plans, just in case.

parasites will wait till you're at your weakest to strike

they're brutal like that
they don't give a fuck

your weakness is their time to shine

and start taking up residence in your most private of places

you'll come back home, exhausted

and they're sitting in your favourite chair

they're eating all the food in your fridge

they're fucking your wife and having all the fun

i eventually got out of this downward spiral
i burned my bed and half of my possessions
i found people who understood
i got a hearing aid and i let people cater to me
i severed the ties and stood on my own
i threw away the plans and got rid of the implements

i cut out the contaminated flesh and gave myself time to heal

i knew i would never be the same again

but also, i knew that wouldn't stop me