The cosmocrator who tells the lie about his birth
and lies about his secret teachings
threatens the existence of the slow
consuming sun. Truth is coldly night.
They wrote their bible in bright letters
while baybirds screamed over the desert.
But I am the beast of light, a phantom
hiding in a bag, a tool for the magician.
I am the beast of light, a negative,
a cry against the night, a candle against the laws
of darkness, a candle against the invisible,
and when I cry, it is deep like a sigh
of unclean blood. When I fade, their whispers
of death follow me like a ghost scent.
And when they praise me as a means
of comforting the sick, my name is an empty shell,
a cry against the desperate, a planetsong
like a rat sighing against the eye of the hungry.
Artificial Intelligence-Generated Poetry from a Dataset of Willis Barnstone’s Sonnets (Programmed and Collated by Bilal Shaw & Tony Barnstone)