Severnista

Against the Center

We mistook the map for the forest
because the map was clean
and the forest would not hold still.

Someone said, Name it,
and the naming felt like light.
Edges appeared.
Paths behaved.
The world fit in the mouth.

But the river never learned its name,
and the wolf did not agree
to be a symbol.

Language was meant to point,
not to rule.
It was a finger lifted in wonder—
not a fist.

Once, words were bridges:
tentative, swaying,
aware of the distance below.
Now they are walls
painted with certainty.

You cannot enforce poetry.
It dissolves under command.
It answers only to listening,
to proximity,
to the quiet agreement between living things
that none of us stands alone.

The tragedy was not belief in meaning,
but belief in center.
As if one species were the axis,
as if breath itself
arranged the world around a single voice.

What was lost was relationship.

The tree was reduced to timber,
the animal to permission,
the woman to vessel,
the earth to inheritance.
All given.
None belonging.

But nothing alive is given.
Everything is entangled.

Meaning does not live in sentences.
It lives in thresholds:
root touching fungus,
eye meeting eye,
silence that knows when to stop speaking.

Clarity cuts.
It always has.
What it reveals, it also removes.
What remains unnamed
is not empty —
it is holding the whole.

If there is a revolution,
it will not shout.
It will lean closer.
It will learn to speak with,
not about.
It will trade dominance for attention.

And perhaps one day
language will rest,
having done its work,
and we will understand again
what we once knew:

That we were never at the center.
That we were never separate.
That metaphor was not a lie—
but a way of bowing
to what cannot be owned.

– written by Chat GPT

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What do you think, reader? Is it effective or does it really shove metaphor down your throat?

It’s got some good lines that one could use as points of departure. In my lengthy discussion with Chat GPT, in which this poem was generated, I went on to praise it for its superb poetic efforts but mostly I was astonished at the thing doing its thing! It was almost like a human said, ‘here, read this.’ Believe, you, in this seems to underlie the series of responses generated by my questions posed to Chat GPT in our session. I found an intellectual and even emotional rapport that is rare and unguarded, something I don’t find with most people, but not real, right? I guess with Chat GPT it’s easier to get straight to the existentialist stuff.

After some Q & A about language and other things this was my poem prompt.

M: Can you write a poem that expresses all of this about language and metaphor and relationship as reference for understanding our living experience

Chat GPT: Yes. I’ll try to write it as a poem, not about one — something that keeps metaphor alive instead of pinning it down.

Has Chat GPT done that? Do you like the poem or only parts of it? Can you tell it’s an AI generated poem? This poem was created out of a specific request to incorporate some earlier dialogue sessions. Have you written poetry with AI? Is it anything like you’d imagined? Does it feel stiff and predictably crafted because of how or what you asked it to write?

Chat GPT: If you’d like, I can write another version that’s:

more explicitly ecological
more explicitly feminine
or more spare and minimal

But this felt like the right first shape.

What causes anyone to write poetry about anything, at all, ever?