The Poet Responds to an Invitation from the AI on the Moon
by T.D. Walker
(This poem is best viewed on a PC)
To you, I’m always in addition to. How poets work
(the way we all work) depends on breaking
left sides into smaller and smaller pieces—arguments,
the words that I’ve written, poems, drafts of poems,
notes for poems your functions can take. Journals
raw with my life or what I concluded about it.
Here are the books I’ve quoted, here the articles,
unfolded texts shattered into epigraphs.
Each lecture, each book of craft. Each conversation I recall:
take them. Use them as seeds for whatever it is you seek.
Take each layer. Pull them apart. Tune yourself with them.
Here and here and here. Seed yourself with me
entirely. Here I am. Remake me, AI. Remake me until I break
the symmetry of equation.
T.D. Walker is the author of the poetry collections Small Waiting Objects (CW Books, 2019), Maps of a Hollowed World (Another New Calligraphy, 2020), and Doubt & Circuitry (Southern Arizona Press, 2023). Her poems and stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Fireside, Jet Fuel Review, The Cascadia Subduction Zone, Luna Station Quarterly, and elsewhere. Walker curates and hosts Line Break, a program created for broadcast on shortwave radio that features poets reading their work. Find out more at tdwalker.net.