a generated poem

A Machine Helps Me Write A Poem About Fire            
When I speak, I must say
that one of us is him,
whose heart is tainted
and whose blood does not rise
until it has eaten the soil
and is the soil itself?

Under fire, I say:
our dreams are teeming
with riverwater. We tremble
at the sun and fear the blood
that gives it substance. See
the sun: spark breathes fire
destroys and creates also.

A light, luminous, tempered only
by suns. We stand together
with the singing birds
in the timestream now spent.
In a green-chipped garden
of fruit trees we rest and know
the true extent of our love.

The sun allows us to think,
to come to belief.

What is memory if not an origin?

What is desire,
if not less desire
and love anesthetized as knowledge,
caged in the beginnings
and far beyond?

“Plea” is an extinct word. It means to beg.
“Conviction” is an extinct word. It means to know.

There is an earth beneath my bones,
laid bare to the grass, to the trees, to the sun.
There is an afterlife for all who can take
such effort from this life.
The earth we call the mother beneath us
is not so. Her kisses were the first
expansions of seedlings, not her breath.
The wild is a denial of her strength.
In her way, she crumbles under her own weight,
but the scars of division do not fit her,
and she weeps for the everlasting
dust. When the gods wept for her, the earth
altered and grew, and mountains
stuffed her throat, built herself
upon with layers, with elements,
until a water spring became
a sea, an ocean.

In these days our sons still yield
their birthright till we know
it as we do. The earth doesn’t
give birth to rivers, nor
is it formed in grain. What sustains
the abscess is the living. What
is healing is the love
that forms and the love that must.

In the hour we must believe,
we must
be reborn.