Please Use AI

On the choice to remain present for a life that cannot be streamlined

(Inspired by a piece of the same name by Shawn Smucker, check out his brilliant work!)

This poem is about the kinds of knowledge that can only be learned by living. The things that cannot be outsourced because the time they take is the point.

Because being changed by love is the point.
Because carrying loss is the point.
Because a life is not built from answers, but from attention.

An attempt, perhaps, to put language around the parts of being human that refuse shortcuts:

---

“Please Use AI”

Please use AI
when your mother dies.

Ask it what grief feels like.
Let it explain bereavement
in twelve clear bullet points.

Do not spend years
finding her
in the supermarket
by the tomatoes she always bought,
in the smell of rain on warm pavement,
discovering new ways
to miss her.

Please use AI
the next time you fall in love.

Ask it how to know
whether someone is the one.

It will give you a faster answer
than watching a person become familiar,
learning how they take their tea,
which floorboards will wake them,
how their silence sounds
when something is wrong.

And please use AI
for your wedding vows,
your eulogies,
your apologies.

Why struggle
for the right words
when a machine can give you
beautiful ones?

Words untouched by shaking hands.
Words that have never sat beside
a hospital bed.
Words that have never known
the terrible privilege
of having something to lose.

Meanwhile

I will be over here
watching someone I love
fall asleep on the sofa,
the television talking to itself,
rain tapping the windows,
the dog twitching in her dreams,

wasting my life
on these small unremarkable moments
that become,
without asking permission,
the whole thing.

---

If you’d like to support my writing, you can do so here:

---