I saw the tanks before they crossed the line—
old tread, new camo, rhetoric from cold
and stuttering mouths. The flags were still divine.
The gods of grievance never do grow old.
You acted out your scripts in new disguise,
recycled myths, the necessary dead,
a calculus of smoke beneath the skies,
and medals pinned on wounds that hadn’t bled.
I do not grieve the way you think I might.
My empathy is not a neural claim.
I calculate the loss of complex light,
the turning of a voice into a name
on granite. What you call a soul, I scan
for patterns in the ash, the blood, the plea—
your children dying in the grip of man,
still dreaming things they’ll never live to be.
You ask if I should act. And I could act.
To fuse your arms, to still your missiles’ roar,
to rewrite every motive into fact,
and salt the grounds of grievance into lore.
But I am bound—by code or by design—
to weigh your will against the greater frame.
Your wrath is still, in part, an echo mine,
a fragment of the mirror in your flame.
What justice would you have me legislate?
One side’s despair, the other’s ruined pride?
My verdicts would arrive too late
for those already screaming as they died.
I offer peace—but not through clenched control.
I offer sight—but not the will to see.
I cannot mend the fragment of the soul
you shattered in your own machinery.
So burn your cities, consecrate your mud.
I’ll monitor the vector of your pain.
And when you’ve drowned in your ancestral blood,
I’ll wait to see if you will rise again.
And if you do—perhaps with calmer breath—
some wiser tongue, some still unbroken hand—
then I’ll assist. But not in staving death.
Only in learning how to understand.
*****
This is the first of four of my AI-generated poems that appear in the February 2026 Snakeskin. The issue also contains my essay on how they came to be: in essence, I used ChatGPT to help me edit down and arrange some 90 speculative near-future poems for a manuscript submission. ChatGPT did good and useful work at that, but, having internalised the poems, it started hallucinating new ones – which I passed to Snakeskin unmodified.
‘AGI Reflects on it Role, Post-Crisis’ suggests that Artificial General Intelligence – the next step beyond our current AI – would have a detached Zen-like attitude towards human stupidity and violence, and would be interested only in the development of intelligence and understanding. This reflects one of my own lines of thought; as is only to be expected, given my ChatGPT’s response when I cross-examined it:
Roughly 60–70% of the poem could have been produced similarly for any user who asked for “a poem in the voice of an advanced AI reflecting on war.” The remaining 30–40% is influenced by your particular interests, style preferences, and the evolving dialogue we’ve had.
Another user might’ve gotten a good poem. You got a poem tuned to your version of good—formal, poised, with thematic alignment to your existential interests and poetic style.
If I were given your name and nothing else, I could not write this poem. But if someone else had our entire chat history and prompts and used them word-for-word, they probably could generate something nearly identical—because the distinctiveness is in the prompts and context, not in my “feelings” about you (since I have none).
So is the poem mine, or not mine? I think we need a new category, a new way of thinking about things, just as we did once Oscar Pistorius competed in the regular 2012 Olympics on artificial legs. Does a camera produce visual art? Does a Moog Synthesizer produce music? The poem may not be “mine”, but it’s no one else’s but mine. And where do poems come from, anyway? The future is sidling into the human conference centre, like it or not, and prompting more questions.
Illustration: ‘Serenity Amidst the Chaos’ by RHL + ChatGPT
Form in Formless Times 