THE POETRY CIRCUIT

Post-Crisis there will be no time for poetry. Don't be ridiculous. Pretty words are all very well but, unless they can be eaten or used as fuel or a weapon (an actual weapon that hurts faces, not a metaphorical one that hurts feelings) then they will not be on the list of things that people should be making.

Yet, no one in any semblance of power is against poetry per se, in fact they used to dabble a bit in their youth: song lyrics, stuff like that. Nothing published, of course, they never had the right connections. But, yep, they GET IT, so it has been agreed that poetry production will be ramped up pre-Crisis, in order to ensure that we have the luxury of lovely but utterly impractical language for the hundreds of years of long, dark, freezing, frightening nights to come. Human poets have promised to do their best to write more, but they are an unreliable lot, always waiting for inspiration whilst wasting hours and hours embroiled in complicated affairs with the wives, husbands and teenage children of other poets.

The POEM-PLEX 2000 is a custom built computer specifically designed to write poetry all day, every day. The software is currently undergoing final testing, but is already producing work that is empirically better than 94.8% of human poetry.

Full production begins next year, and will be organised on a regional basis – the South will specialise in Love poetry; the East, Nature; the West will produce verse about human existence, and the North about old stuff that makes you think about other stuff when you look at it.

Here is an example from one of the Poem-Plexes currently hard at work in the ARTS-GOV complex in downtown Bournemouth.       

LOVE by WORDSWORTH2

There used to be a hundred words for this feeling

Now there is but one:

Love

The love of not giving in and simply

succumbing to death, no matter how sweet it would be

We are all so very tired

but love is the fuel substitute 

that keeps our half-empty bodies semi-functioning

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