Today,
Waking early, I reached for Elizabeth.
But, finding Robert, I read of death
And how the May
Left him bereft.
I am drowning in envy of Browning
For he so well caught
How short
Is our May.
For all things must fade away.
Death leaves friends bereft.
Yet poetry remains
To soothe our pain.
When a scantily clad young lady in Chester
Said, “sir, won’t you become my investor?”,
And I asked her why.
She said, “my name is Sky.
And I’m a very hot prospect in Chester!”
When a young lady that I once kissed
Said, “tell me, are you a moral relativist?”,
I said, “darling Lou,
Would that bother you?”,
She said, “I liked it when we kissed …!”
When a young lady wearing 1 spectacle
Said, “Kevin, tell me, are you respectable?”,
I said to her, “Ria,
I have been called insincere.
But I have never been called respectable!”
A summer rain falls.
And birds sing.
The earth smells fresh.
But I recall
I have bills to pay.
Yet returning home
To my working day
I carry birdsong
And the rich earth
In my heart.
Nature’s art
Feeds my poetry.
Yet she
Outshines all poetry.
Heels at night
And creaking bedsprings.
A morning blackbird sings.
It’s song heard
By neighbours who delight
In what they overheard
The other night …
When a young man using Chat GPT
Asked it to make him some tea,
It wrote about Ceylon
And hallucinated about Ron.
But he still hasn’t got his tea!
I am often told
That time
Is merely an illusion.
Yet rhyme
Has beginning and end.
And time
My ever present friend
Will stop
This ageing clock
In the end.
When I met the poet Milton
In the supermarket shopping for Stilton,
And I spoke of “Paradise Lost”,
He said, “have you seen the cost
Of all these cheeses, especially this Stilton!”
She walks through the city’s gaudy glow,
Her unquiet grace in torpid midnight air,
Heels write stories only the lonely know
Of longing, forced laughter, and mutual despair.
Her sadness hides behind a smile.
She offers warmth for those who pay the fee,
Yet look behind her carefully constructed style
And you will see another she.
She’s practiced in the art of polite chat,
Of weaving silken moments, bright and brief,
Her eyes—two lanterns—never showing that
They sometimes flicker shadows dark with grief.
And in her step the wise will see
Others who have long left the player’s empty stage.
Sometimes, in her honest times she may truly see
That she has made her own mind-constructed cage.
(The above poem was composed using Microsoft’s Copilot, then modified by me. I meant to retain the poem as originally produced by Copilot. However, due to an oversight by me, only the present poem remains. This is unfortunate as it was my intention to publish both poems on my blog in order that my readers could take a critical look at the poem as originally composed by AI, and that modified by me).
K Morris - Poet 