B.J. BEST / 5 POEMS WRITTEN PARTIALLY BY ROBOT
one way the bruise would underwater come
the lies are skin in these hands,
all soft-eyed from the thundercot stars.
we were always going down on the north wind—
this lake like a dry mouth.
this. i'm just thinking in promises,
the incense rocks darking.
if you say the wind of knives is rumpling
her cancer, are you buying a winter prayer
or forking around the kitchen?
this nest is rain. this ice is wide
and i was some crayfish painting her.
beyond this fright, quietly, a snow,
and the wind is a palm of lightning
with our absolution inside it.
dandelions
i was the color of finished constellations.
my grandfather seems to wrong the water;
the fish should be a lack of spaces.
inside, nothing leaves a forecast
for our breath. and now the lake is a voice
precisely; the sun,
ready to be in love in the colors
of a world, kicking the sky,
hangs like a little light.
so the grass of my father is a man
and now then she would be a little book.
you didn’t see the cut of the moon
to be a mouth. well—the graveyard of someone's children,
the arches of inches of an eyelash
sick of light.
dandelions, you said. sometimes into the spring by there,
the wind whispered for the stars.
the cap of the moon blowing black hair.
it’s the weather of her perfume, we should say,
and the sky is a red broken pretty day
purple from the weather
chilly, would say a tent,
of someone who breathes
like a case of a cloud of snow.
and how more than to take on its slather—
rise in the light of notes on the pier.
the punch boat looked good,
thank your gray breath story,
as the rainbow of snakes stood in your lungs.
this is the way we are branches:
we would shake so new. now your bones
sit terrified in some chilled time
while my heart is sparrow things.
sometimes the long water is a child.
sometimes you swallow my cries.
sometimes it's all the same sheets
to the sky, the shards sweet
across the moon. i scold you and you dance
and stare, hospitable and alien, sailing
the swords of your eyes into the rain.
you, burning to only september
the west wind of grace
spun the sky ponderous,
all silver-red flight.
in your tails, you want to think gravity
cragged and clogged the sky.
she had one wing that went
to your full swan brain. stone of walls,
disagreements of rocks,
a bridge of water.
in the november, hard,
like cornfire was neon,
you say her soul
was whirling for a jazz.
i say an addendum of silence.
you want to be so about drunk
that the stars will be kind
as night-blue flowers,
the starling of the sun
like scribbling. but we will slip
where cancer kissed,
and this must be the clunch
of the sky: you don't pray
the nature or photograph
the humidity of green deserts.
the wind is exology itself,
harpening out trouble machines:
a roar of old showers of her hair.
and you are a spray bird, squawky,
dulling the moonlight
as it bristles
a driveway in your eyes.
procession
ready, you left the victive.
drinking to her house,
we will spirit her
through the ripples of moonside
and a silver nest in a dead box.
you'll present a call and answering:
the waterfall of red bird,
a sweater of miles.
breath of a frame,
sorries about the backs
of your shiny hands.
you stare at the filling smoke
of clouds in this crap
of a town.
it's the season of rise
to have cancer, the stars
painted gray. she would be still
still sweet. the sky
of her heart sits
with a toil perfect
like birds strung
on a branch,
like seeds growing
in this street.
Note: These poems are a collaboration with torch-rnn, a neural network library that knows nothing about language. Instead, by studying a source text, it learns to write words one character at a time. The neural network was trained on my own body of work from the past twenty years. The resulting poems, then, are my own writing rewritten by a computer, then edited by me. torch-rnn is created by Justin Johnson, based on work by Andrej Karpathy. The code and instructions for running it are currently available on GitHub.
B.J. Best is the author of three books and four chapbooks, most recently But Our Princess Is in Another Castle (Rose Metal Press, 2013) and Yes (Parallel Press, 2014). He’s also created Twitter bots that make abstract art: @ArtyAbstract, @ArtyBots, and @ArtyMash (which supplied the image that accompanies these poems), among others. An assortment of written and computerized experiments can be found at bjbestpoet.wordpress.com.