Flying back to the shore
          I think that none of us are free
          bound as we are

          by promises outliving us all,
          the grasping at things
          pulling us in and out of worlds.

So writes Kate Buckley in "A Poem of Strong Wishes," which appears in her 2008 book A Wild Region. I have never heard any poet or philosopher state it better. Buckley's poem is about the narrator flying home to Kentucky to care for her grandmother. You may exchange that scenario for one of your choice. The overriding truth is the same: We spend our lives mired in work that we will leave unfinished. The promises will outlive us, and someone will take our place to keep them for a short while longer. Years ago, during a Sunday service at the Self-Realization Fellowship, I heard one of the monks say, "No one is indispensable." Since we are all dispensed with eventually, that realization takes on a form of relief.

But, as Buckley says, we are not free. All the rationalization that we can muster about the shortness of life or our tininess in the cosmos cannot erase the significance that we attach to our work. It is our work, after all, and we are the central character in our own life story. Perhaps we're paid for our efforts, and perhaps not. Perhaps they even appear to others as play or hobbies. It doesn't matter; at some point, we all take on responsibilities that we tell ourselves cannot be mishandled. Pilots promise to land passengers safely; firefighters promise to protect buildings; doctors promise to cure the sick. To make it through a lifetime without denting a single plane, letting a single building burn down, or losing a single patient must be some sort of vindication. The promises outlive us, true, but we can at least say that we kept them while we were here.

My poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, "The Pool Coach Sings Hallelujah," is about a man who has promises to keep. (Yes, I am thinking of Robert Frost as I write those words.) He is aware not only that they will outlive him, but also that they outlived the person who came before him. He also suspects that that person did a better job. Think back on the pool coach at your own high school; probably, you can think of at least one time when he barked at the students or paced exasperatedly on the deck. Swimming pools have a way of bringing out immaturity in teenagers, and a coach may resort to a martinet level of discipline to maintain his authority. No doubt Mister Rogers could have talked a rowdy freshman team gently into compliance, but he wasn't a pool coach. The lead character in "The Pool Coach Sings Hallelujah" knows the expectations put on him -- his predecessor was taller, and evidently had a deeper voice -- and he even has dreams in which the outlines of a coach walk around the pool deck and commands the team. He is the person now assigned to fill those outlines, and he's not sure if his colors fill the space.

It's a tough job for a romantic, but he is one. In the predawn hours -- before he encounters the pregnant sophomore again, before he's reminded of the drive-by a mile away from school -- he fires up his car and goes in search of the sublime. On the car radio, Aretha Franklin and the Sensational Nightingales trill; the constellations glisten above; the buildings and churches loom in silhouette. It adds up to a daily affirmation: Things can be done correctly, and they can look majestic when they are. At our best, we may look majestic, too. Sometimes, we feel that that's our duty; our promises to others can still involve plenty of ego on our part. Pool coaches want to appear formidable to the team, and if the team succeeds, then they may credit that to their powers of influence. The trick is harnessing those powers, and that can lead to anxious dreams. Failure, as the saying goes, is not an option for many of us.

If you have a piece of paper handy, grab it and jot down what you are working toward in life right now. In a small sense, each of your projects will likely be completed. In a large sense, none of them ever will be. The other day, my 8th-grade class and I talked about the persistence of to-do lists. We all spend our days checking them off, and the grind can be maddening at times. But what if the students stopped submitting their homework? What if I stopped planning lessons? The moment we began shirking our promises, we would realize how many people we made those promises to: parents, colleagues, administrators, everyone else who contributes to making St. Cyril of Jerusalem School a stable and functioning community. The school stands because we work to make it stand. We will pass the baton one day, but St. Cyril will loom without us. Before dawn, when the stars twinkle over the roof of the church, it might even fill a passerby with wonder.

I may never have written a sadder poem than “Thief After Dark,” the piece that appears this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder. I am not talking about subject matter – no one dies in this poem, or even gets hurt – but simply about tone and consistency. Scanning over this poem, more than 20 years after I wrote it, I am struck by the sheer number of negative words: “didn’t,” “only,” “no one,” “without,” “never,” “not even,” “nothing.” Then there are the sensory images in between: “thief,” “silent,” “shadows,” “darkest figure,” “alarm,” “back turned,” “steal.” Morning does make an appearance in the poem, but only to emphasize the lines under a despondent woman's eyes.

I'm not sure if I would write a poem like this today. Would, not could. When I wrote "Thief After Dark" (and the 2002 chapbook from FarStarFire Press that bears its name), I was into grand statements as a writer -- not atypical of an undergraduate, I'm sure. I went for operatic touches, heightened emotions, characters who lived to be anxious or fatalistic. In the years since, I've sought a kind of equilibrium, a forum for the kind of emotions that don't easily fit under a label. Looking back at the last few poems that have appeared in Radical Wonder, I'm not sure if any of them can be labeled simply as "happy" or "sad"; they occupy a rubbery space in between. In "Woman Next Door," a comfortable couple watches a heated domestic dispute through window glass; in "Grandfather," an old man who has fled turmoil in Asia coexists in an American home with rambunctious children and their toys. "Ghost Town Pantoum," which portrays a romantic couple roaming through abandoned streets, contains the line "We kiss in the shade of the jail." It took years for me to understand the possibilities of that kiss. In poems like "Thief After Dark," we get only the jail.

But then, as the old saying goes, we should be moderate in all things, including moderation. Every poem can't balance the light and the dark; sometimes, we need to lurch into one extreme or the other. When I jotted down "Thief After Dark" as a student at UCI, I must have felt the need for catharsis of some kind. As I have noted before, many of my poems during those years were spontaneous, nocturnal pieces; I would wake in the middle of the night with an idea, scribble it in the notepad by my bed, then flop back on the mattress. "Thief After Dark" came about that way. I don't recall having felt like the narrator in the poem, but perhaps I was imagining the life of an older, richer person (he and his partner must have done well, at least superficially, to live in "a silent house along the coast") whose wealth couldn't shield him from despair.

I was a serious writer then, maybe to a fault. Years later, I would watch Ben Trigg and Steve Ramirez hosting Two Idiots Peddling Poetry at the Ugly Mug and recognize the value of lightening up. Before then, I operated under the dubious premise that sober was best. Not long after I wrote "Thief After Dark," I got an invitation to give my first poetry reading at Alta Coffee, a gloriously ramshackle venue tucked on a side street in Newport Beach. The reading series was hosted by Lee Mallory, then Orange County's great poetry impresario; I had made his acquaintance by publishing listings for his shows in the Los Angeles Times and decided to chance the open mic there one night. Once invited back, I rehearsed my reading painstakingly, to the point where my co-feature took me aside a few minutes before showtime, gestured toward the people sitting at the dim, mismatched tables, and dryly intoned, "Michael -- these are your friends." As I recall, "Thief After Dark" was among the poems that I read that night. I probably did a good job of reading it, even if the show as a whole lacked a certain lightness of being.

Now, more than 20 years have passed, and that performance that once felt like a herculean trial has receded into memory -- mine, if no one else's. At some point in life, we take inventory of what has survived and what hasn't. Most of what I described above falls into the latter category: FarStarFire Press has gone out of business, Mallory has moved out of California and retired his readings, and the Times no longer runs Orange County poetry listings. What remains is "Thief After Dark," which I like to this day and which, to my knowledge, has never been pirated or plagiarized. I made certain of that; before I gave the reading at Alta, I registered all of the poems in my notebook with the Library of Congress to ensure that no one would steal them. Back then, I understood poetry as a business, even if it only paid in tip jars.

In 1964, Kitty Genovese was knifed to death in the alley beside her apartment in New York. Two weeks later, the New York Times published an article with the famous headline "Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police" -- an account so inaccurate that the paper retracted it in the killer's obituary 52 years later. Still, the original version of the story entered public consciousness to the point where the phrase "Kitty Genovese" became shorthand for the apathy of bystanders. Not long after the incident, singer-songwriter Phil Ochs opened a composition by ridiculing those involved: "Oh, look outside the window, there's a woman being grabbed / They've dragged her to the bushes, and now she's being stabbed / Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain / But Monopoly is so much fun, I'd hate to blow the game..."

The thing about inaccurate news stories is that they're often wrong only in a specific sense. Thirty-eight people may not have actually stood by while Genovese died, but similar things have happened to others. As a species, we tend to come up short in moments that call for intervention. I'm hardly one to cast stones; once, I took part in a CPR class in which we practiced giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to plastic babies. After a series of scripted drills, the instructor dropped one of the babies on the floor and ordered us to act as though it were a real emergency. We all stood blinking at each other, expecting someone else to pretend to call 911. We were mired in our own comfort zones, clinging to our even keel the way Ochs' characters clung to their game. Of course, that was a plastic baby. A real one would have fired up our endorphins and spurred us into action. It's nice to tell ourselves that.

A college professor of mine once said that we're more likely to intervene -- particularly in a violent incident -- if we're in a bad mood. Then, we're more inclined to punch a mugger in the face or chase an assailant who towers over us. ​If we're feeling decent enough, our inhibitions take over. We worry too much about going off script. Think about the template that most of us wake to each morning: We will rise at the usual time in a comfortable bed, shower and have breakfast inside a sturdy roof and walls, and fire up the car that runs dependably. The clerks at stores will be polite and helpful. The people that we pass on the street will smile but stay out of our way. We will have a few chosen interactions with friends and family members who serve as confidants. At work, we will be productive, complete our regular tasks, and move in a general direction toward a future that is healthy and prosperous. We will fit in a favorite song or two, enjoy a drink or movie when responsibilities are done. Our phone and credit cards will await us in the morning. Yes, we know that chaos exists, but that's the principle of yin and yang -- we recognize things by their opposites. If misfortune strikes, it will strike someone else, and that will serve to illuminate how easy our own path is.

We spend a fair amount of our day near windows. They're one of our more symbolic inventions: a clear view of the outside world that's separated from us by an invisible pane. My poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, "Woman Next Door," centers on action that takes place on both sides of a window. A couple lives on one side; they're bystanders, like the fewer-than-38 who ignored Genovese. On the other side is the title character, who appears in the midst of a blowup with her partner. We only see her; the man stays inside the house as she hurls his guitar onto the lawn, flips the middle finger, then ends up flustered at the street corner, radiating indecision about where to go.

Does the couple intervene? Well, would you? Look out the nearest window right now and imagine that you witnessed a similar scene. Probably your mind would start ticking off a list of criteria. Has the woman actually been attacked? No -- there doesn't appear to be any physical abuse. Is she the victim, still? Maybe not -- she is obviously strong enough to fight back. Do you know her? Not well enough to offer her your guest room. Do you know him? No, and it's probably good that you don't. If the people outside were your sister and brother-in-law, you might be outside right now pleading for a ceasefire. We all have it in us to be heroes. Typically, we require the right preconditions to do it.

The poem ends happily, at least in part. While the marriage next door melts down, the narrator surveys his room and notes all the positive signs: "the corners / without guitars or amps, the books we've checked out / for each other, the hour's small talk priming the air." The eruption outside reminds him of how well he's nurtured a happy home, how much he's profited from staying on script. That's one of the perks of being a bystander. Sometimes, we get to enjoy our own show.

There is a phase during childhood when we start paying attention to the whispers in the house. Early on, we are oblivious to most adult matters, and our questions center on the world as it relates to us: Where does our milk come from? What makes the jack-in-the-box pop up? When we hear grownups talking, their conversations are often incomprehensible. They do not involve us, and so we take little interest in them. Then, as our consciousness expands, we realize that another side of the world is being hidden from us. We wonder what is actually in the songs marked “explicit” that our parents skip on Apple Music, what is written in the books on the high shelf. Sometimes, we gather perplexing bits of evidence, but we would need an older sleuth to piece them together for us.
 
“Grandfather,” my poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, is about that time of bewildered curiosity. It appeared in The First Thing Mastered, which came out ten years ago this month from Tebot Bach and was the first book that I wrote entirely as a piece. Its predecessors, Thief After Dark and College Town, are more or less hodgepodges of unrelated poems; The First Thing Mastered goes chronologically through the first three and a half decades of life, with motifs and developing themes along the way. “Grandfather” fits into the book’s first half. It’s about naivete, but so are all poems about childhood. I think the reason that time of life is such a rich vein for poets is that we survive it first and figure it out later. When we tap into our elementary-school selves again, we wield the perspective of age but also the memory of those omnivorous wide eyes. I think of the famous line from Sandra Cisneros: "What they don't understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you're eleven, you're also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one."
 
I remember being all those ages. If Cisneros is to be trusted, then I still have each of them in me. "Grandfather" is not based on a true story, but I grew up around mysteries, as all of us do, and perhaps this poem came out of lingering curiosities. The title character is a patriarch who lives with two younger generations of his family. He fled unrest in some country, presumably in Asia, and now lives a quiet life full of strict routines: the same drink poured at the same time, the same music on the radio, the same ritual of waking up. The children in the house are fascinated by his past but know not to question the whispers. Those faded photographs and artifacts in the drawer must mean something, and the answer will remain unknown until someone says it out loud.
 
This poem contain a double meaning that I didn’t realize when I wrote it. At the end, the grandfather walks into the room where the children are playing with action figures, taps the plastic Darth Vader, and intones, Real guys like this. Real guys. Over the years, I’ve had a few people express curiosity about the intent of those lines. Is the grandfather cautioning the children that villains aren’t simply a fictional concept -- i.e., “There are real guys like this in the world”? Or is he complimenting the boys for being manly by playing war games -- i.e., “Real guys like this sort of thing”?
 
When I wrote those lines, I had one of the above meanings in mind and didn’t even think about the other one. Which one did I intend? I refuse to say. This is a poem about secrets, so I’m content to let it have a secret of its own. The other week, I quoted Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica,” which ends with the proclamation “A poem should not mean / but be.” If the final lines of this poem resonate on their own, then they’ve done their basic duty. I have a feeling that if we asked the grandfather to explain his comments, he would be elusive too.

The oldest-known writer in human history is Kushim, a name that was etched on several clay tablets in ancient Sumer. As a writer, Kushim wasn't quite in a league with Shakespeare or Homer -- his work consisted of lists of transactions of barley -- but he started a glorious tradition of human beings writing things and putting their names on them. That practice has existed for more than 3,000 years, and now there's speculation about whether artificial intelligence is bringing it to an end. In recent months, platforms such as GPT-4 have proven capable of everything from passing the bar exam to perfectly emulating the style of a poet or novelist. There's an old joke that writers don't really like to write; they just like to have written. In that case, why not spare yourself the hours of tedious brainstorming and revision and just order up a masterpiece with a few keystrokes?

I have two responses to that question: one from a writer's perspective, and one from a reader's. For the first, I'll offer a quote from the French novelist Gustave Flaubert that appears on a podium in my classroom: "The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe." I have never written anything without learning something about myself, and I urge my students to adopt the same attitude. You will make mistakes in the course of writing: ideas that go nowhere, reasoning that doesn't hold up, even a misplaced modifier or two. All of those foibles will help you grow as a person, and they may lead you to create something truly profound that you didn't think you had in you. As for the reader's perspective, I can say that, at least in some circumstances, I can detect AI-produced content within a few seconds. There is a coldness and slickness to it, all the more obvious when coming from writers whose work is not usually cold or slick. It has a flat formality, an over-dependence on logic and rationality. It gets everything right -- obviously, it can pass a test for a letter grade -- but it's a clear case of the mind and body without the soul.

One of my favorite games now is to identify pieces of writing that a machine couldn't possibly have created. The Poetry Foundation lobbed me an easy one this morning; its Poem of the Day is "[anyone lived in a pretty how town]" by E.E. Cummings, whose style would have confounded any AI device in the early 20th century. Yes, nowadays, you can order ChatGPT to "write a poem about two lovers in the style of E.E. Cummings." For that concept to exist, a mercurial human would have had to create it first. Artificial intelligence works efficiently by doing things the right way; human genius works by doing things gloriously the wrong way. That was Cummings, with his shifting parts of speech, self-consciously garbled punctuation, and outright mischievous approach to standard English. What algorithm in 1940 might have had the impulse to name two characters "anyone" and "noone" or twist a composite word into a syntactical beauty like "anyone's any was all to her"? No doubt a chatbot of that time also would have insisted on capitalizing all the words properly.

My poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder is "Segue," which came out a decade ago and is wedded in my memory to an event that AI never could have duplicated. In 2014, artist Deborah Paswaters invited me to a multimedia event in Laguna Beach that, half a century earlier, would have been dubbed a "be-in": Poets read their work aloud while a pianist improvised in response to the poetry, dancers danced in response to the music, and artists sketched the dancers. "Segue" was one of the poems that I read, and I think the one that inspired the most music, dancing, and art. The whole event was as messy and delightful as it sounds, and I still have a souvenir of it on the wall of my study; Paswaters signed and framed a sketch that she did of me and the dancers. Yes, AI can produce pictures too, and much faster than any artist. It can also produce music and poetry, maybe even choreography. But note that I'm using the verb "produce" rather than "write" or "compose." Humans do those things. I'm not sure if AI takes the same journey of discovery.

I was thinking of ending this blog entry by asking ChatGPT to write a poem in the style of "Segue," then copying and pasting it here. I've decided against it. If you want to try, though, here are the guidelines: Ask for a 39-line, six-section poem about the feeling in the house after a family member dies. Specify that you want free verse and a reference to Frank Sinatra. Require a one-word title that appears nowhere in the poem itself. Perhaps the chatbot will give you something brilliant. Perhaps it will be even better than "Segue." I frankly don't care. I am proud of this poem and accept that immodesty is human. AI can give us a masterpiece, but it can't relish its own creation. Kushim probably could.