THE HUNGRY BOYFRIEND

 

The Hungry Boyfriend

 

lounges in the recliner with his pressed coffee and remote,

top shelf chaser, knuckles in his mouth.

Only the best for the double negative boyfriend

who loves her and promises he won’t do it again

but he’s always so hungry, hungry, hungry.

 

Curtains drawn, superheroes on the screen

he waits for her to come home with food.

A high-flying career guy who pushes carts in the rain

is it any wonder he can dish out the pain?

He gobbles up friends and eats self esteem

devours her cash like a casino machine.

 

Lock your phone with a thumbprint, sleep with a knife

when a double negative boyfriend sneaks into your life.

But she tells all who listen he won’t do it again,

nothing to worry about from this DN boyfriend.

 

He’s calm and connected, swallows his pills dry,

patiently pacing for the mouse to arrive.

But she did it again and ruined his mood

empty handed up the walk, bitch where’s my food!

The Silk and the Tassel

 

The apricot moon rises in my window

as the whirr of the coffee mill

grinds hand-picked Guatemalan beans                

and the pungent scent wafts up the stairs

where I’m abed with a reading light

one eye on the antics of The Monkey Wrench Gang

and their wandering skipper

and one on the sturgeon moon

rising unobstructed above the trees,

a sight the eco-terrorist hooligans would celebrate.

Sheets of rain rattle the corn in the night

rinsing dust off the tassels and dampening the windowsill.

The rain gauge fell into the peony bush Gracie hides under

cool soft earth, her secret place.

Only green marble eyes and velvet rose nose peep out at me.

I fish the gauge out of the foliage

and hang it back on the railing.

For what would I be willing to risk

shackles and confinement,

cat and home and coffee in the morn?

Written to a prompt from dVerse asking poets to choose at least three names of butterflies in a poem. 

My three are: 

Wandering Skipper

Green Marble

Velvet Rose

And for What's Going On  the poet's blog where this week they've asked us to write something about eyes, what we see or what sees us.

Artificial Intelligence in Publishing

 

The latest AI intrusion into publishing is a sci-fi/romance self-published on Amazon that went viral on tiktok and was recently picked up in a very big deal by Simon & Schuster. With its 60% positive rating on the AI detection software Pangram, it was almost certainly written with artificial intelligence. Though there is controversy about Pangram's false positive rate, an expert on AI-language detection not affiliated with the study stated that it’s “almost statistically impossible” for an entirely human-written book to register as sixty percent AI. If all the suspect sentences were redacted, it would look like the Epstein files: “They collapsed together, a tangle of sweat-slicked limbs and racing hearts.” It’s hard enough for new, traditionally published authors to break through the noise in today’s publishing landscape without having to compete with the thousands of novels written, at least in part, by artificial intelligence.” AI-generated ebooks, easily produceable at scale for self-publishing on Amazon, are cannibalizing the market for human-written texts. It's unfortunate we have to have this conversation. AI was rolled out too quickly with no regulation and it's running amuck in writing platforms and being used in schools, even at the elementary level when children are most susceptible to the lazy way out instead of exploring the creative imagination hard-wired into human beings.