Unbidden
If you see me walking,
back bent, feet dragging
through the woods behind my house
pulling a bag of trash,
just know that I won’t be littering.
Oh, yes it will be trash!
But no, no it’ll be a bag filled with
five hundred sheets of paper
from my countless, tired-filled,
churning, turning thoughts—
made in silence when it was never really silent—
turned into words and sentences and paragraphs
of ramblings and nonsense and dreams.
Back when I was still writing.
Back when I could still color the page
with the crayon labeled “me”.
Nowadays I’m coddled
in a cage of capitalism.
Instead of books and sheets,
I’ll watch my phone from dusk ‘til dawn,
get lost in a world of
Stanley bottles, makeup hauls,
mugs of matcha, hordes of clothing
compressed into an algorithm of mindless doomscrolling—
a never ending stream of consumerism—
what are we eating?
And now what about Chat-GPT?
Use AI to generate, not create.
Plagiarize and lie because all we want is the prize and the highs,
never the lows and the blows of what it means to actually write
or process and think with our brilliant minds.
What are we becoming?
Personality is dead
Creativity is being bled dry
All we want is capital
Because we can barely survive.
It’s a world where nothing is special
Nothing is unique
Nothing is notable
Where all parts will eventually
Equal me.
Truth is, I don’t buy into this culture.
If I remain complacent, then what does that say
of the days I drained my brain for
the last drops of coherent thought to put on the page?
So I’ll tell you what I’m doing in the woods behind my house
with the bags of trash that will never turn into cash.
Watch me fold flocks of birds,
bunches of brilliance, unbidden,
flying across the earth.
Process
During one of my sessions with my mentor Davia, we were reviewing the GWN content on writing spoken word poetry, and to generate ideas and have a starting point, we did a quick exercise where I listed ten nouns, ten verbs, ten adjectives, and ten proper nouns/places. Afterwards, I would use as many of those words as possible to create a poem. The first two words of my noun list were capitalism and consumerism—inspired by the kind of content I have been watching recently, specifically video essays on “de-influencing” people and criticizing the consumerism that is now often present on various social media platforms. These videos made me reflect on myself, my habits , and how I have been neglecting my creative self in place of trying to pursue the path of being an “it girl” or trying to advance in the race race that is the capitalism job market. Of course, AI is also a problem that our capitalistic society has created. By creating machines that can produce art and writing, we are eliminating creatives out of our society, discouraging many from even trying to pursue arts in the first place. “Unbidden” is my response to this development and a reminder to myself to never stop creating and sharing.
