I'm trying not
to fall asleep
I'm lucky enough that I can
write this poem in the dark,
that I can try not to fall asleep
as a kind of entertainment or self-
indulgence. I lit a scented candle
called Lotus Blossom Boom that is
supposed to inspire me to meditate
and smells like vanilla because I had
the creeping feeling something was
staring at me from beyond the veil.
I swear I heard a quiet, insistent voice
whispering: “very little matters in the
moment of a poem, in the spaces between
words, in the terrible line breaks and
stanzas where I live.” The candle flickers,
gutters and goes out, a bell rings, I close
the book I’m reading called: Creepy AF. If I've
learned anything from AI, then I've
learned it really doesn't matter how clever
or how smart I think I am. It doesn’t matter
if the voice is real, or Tupac was a holo-
gram, or AI-generated songs feature
the voices and younger versions
of stars from antiquity because
it all goes into the wood chipper
of helping some young business
dude sound cleverer in the 11th hour
when he writes his project
updates and team emails for his boss'
AI assistant to read out loud. But,
hey, on the flipside I guess: YOLO!
I'm still smart enough to invent new
machines to make me feel FOMO and
inferior; as though being human
were a gag reel full of upper class
twits doing pratfalls so they can
eventually become Prime Minister
or the US President while some
kind of circus music plays along.
On the collective tombstone
of humanity it will read:
afk ROTFLMFAO, brb.
Doesn’t it feel
Like I’m on the cusp of a
discovery that will eradicate my dependence on fossil fuels, end world hunger,
heal and strengthen the planet, turn my trash into treasure? I'm looking at my
kitchen garbage full of plastic that won't fit in my recycling bin. Like a
giant snake is uncoiling behind me while I’m deliriously eating Cheet-ohs and
high-fiving my friends with crusty, orange fingers? Like I’m at the center and
the world is streaming by me in Technicolor?
In reality, I'm churning out paragraph after paragraph of blog copy using AI to overwhelm the search ranking algorithm in the hopes people will buy more cases of whatever highly toxic tonic with no health benefits the company I work for wants to dump before anyone figures out that it causes cancer. Good news though, the rest goes in a landfill! In reality, I’m ten days into binge watching Love Island for the tenth time so I can humble brag to my friends online who I’ve never met and I say friends but really I mean people who reply to my desperate cries for attention and reassurance that I still matter to someone when I finally post that I joined the Decapete team which is an ultra-rare accomplishment for people who binge watch Love Island and they respond with a thumbs up. Doesn’t it feel nice to make a difference in the world, even if it is typing words on a Saturday afternoon while the space heater hums and snow falls and snow plows scrape along outside and my kids are mindlessly watching YouTube shorts because regular YouTube videos are too long? It’s like some machine in the future staring down at me while I'm drooling on the ground clutching my entertainment stuffie that pipes images and sounds directly into my brain will poke me with a stick and ask the other machine: “doesn’t it feel?”.
To error is
humane
When the computer says
Blue screen, it brings me
To life. When my phone
Powers down, then I
Have a choice: charge or
Be charged, there is no joy.
I google: why do I have
no internet tonight, my
love. What have I done
wrong that I can't search
for the worldwide box
office results for Ace Ventura?
I slippery slope my way over
to the fridge and it tells me
it is bedtime, dingus, but I
grab a yogurt drink and a beer.
Be the change you want
To spend on laundry, my
Digital assistant told me.
I digest that while flipping
through a virtual catalogue
for fishing supplies despite
never having fished in my life.
My digital assistant tells
Me that change is for
The week, and if I spend
It all, then I won't get
No more allowance.
I regret setting that spending
limit because I would really
like, at 11 pm, to order a new
vertical waffle iron that I saw
some young person on TikTok
using to make the fluffiest damn
waffles you've ever seen with
little to no mess whatsoever.
As I'm brushing my teeth,
later that night, scratching
my belly and pondering
the meaning of it all, it
suddenly dawns on me:
to error is divine, to divine
Is to find error and make it
Correct in the first place.
In other words, I ordered
the waffle maker and spent
$400 USD on a fly fishing kit,
new rod, bucket hat, wading
gaiters, and several new lures.
I looked in the mirror before
turning out the light, before
going to bed and stared right
into my own eyes and said:
you can't teach a man to fish
without spending a lot of cash.
Anyway, thank you for coming
to my talk on how to turn a few
lines in a poem into a revenue
stream. I hope you can apply
what you've learned to your
own creative practice and turn
a silly metaphor into profit.
Microplastics
are forever!
I get itchy just thinking about how my body might change as a result of all the little, hard bits of chemical residue I've absorbed. I guess that's the joy of being human, it’s my privilege, right? Experiencing evolution even if it is uncomfortable. It is a miracle to feel and understand comfort because we experience discomfort. Not simply as a sensation but as a concept that I can enact. Being able to modify myself and my environment. That's power! Now where did I put my limited edition Deadpool mini-figure again?
Hey, consider this though. What if because of the microplastics filling our bodies we end up preserved and living forever? What if because we were so fucking stupid we actually and accidentally become immortal? I'd watch that movie. Microplastics, man.
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Jason Christie lives and writes in Ottawa with his wife and two children and no pets. His published books include Canada Post (Invisible), i-Robot (EDGE/Tesseract), Unknown Author (Insomniac), and Cursed Objects (Coach House). He’s wrapping up a new collection that he wrote with/against/for AI.
He is the author of nine chapbooks with above/ground press: 8th Ave 15th St NW. (2004), Government (2013), Cursed
Objects (2014), The Charm (2015), random_lines = random.choice
(2017), glass language (excerpt) (2018), Bridge and Burn (2021)
and glass / language / untitled / exaltation (2023; second printing, 2023), which won the
bpNichol Chapbook Award, as well as the forthcoming PSA (2025), from
which these poems emerge.
