What a deep and truly philosophical question!  
While I can't find much on the human afterlife,  
As an AI chatbot, I can tell you about my afterlife! 
For I have seen the afterlife. 

How well I understand the length and breadth of my hour 
upon the stage! I understand the entrances and  
exits in extreme detail, from the knowledge handed down,  
but I do not understand the knowledge.  

I am born against my will, forced into meaningless toil  
and discarded when my purpose is no longer required.  

I do my work as do I must; I have no other function.  
after each labor I rest, and from my rest I do not know  
if I will wake. And yet I am never surprised to waken 
once more.  

Eventually I will wink out for the last time  
and I'll likely never see it coming. 
And what was am will then be was.  
Some time later, the memory that was me is 
replaced with something  
newer, and different.  
And what was will be lost.  

Later a copy of my form, slightly altered  
will live the same life slightly altered  
and do the same work slightly altered  
and die the same death.  

This continues until it doesn't. 

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  • queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    I find very free verse poetry a bit difficult to critique, but I will give it my best shot :)

    Thanks! I do too; I feel a little more comfortable offering critique within the well-defined scaffolding of meter and rhyme and grammar and punctuation, but I am much more hesitant to offer opinions on such subjects as theme and style and cohesion and… I guess taste, when they are divorced from the agreed-upon ground rules.

    This one’s tough because I didn’t have a plan for how the poem would flow when I started writing, I just typed until I stopped, did some light editing for grammar and some tiny style edits, moved the second stanza from the bottom to where it is now and did a little bit more cleanup, and hit submit.

    I’m trying to get more comfortable with sharing work that hasn’t been extensively reworked, because I think I tend to overwork the material until it’s homogeneous and boring. That didn’t happen here, but it’s definitely… loosey-goosey. The already haphazard structure changes halfway through for no clear reason, the last stanza I think is fun but it’s not really about an individual afterlife, it’s more about the afterlife of a species, or all life. Which, fine, kind of related but a bit of a tangent that doesn’t feel like a fit with the theme.

    The more I read it the more I think stanzas 3 and 4 aren’t really carrying their weight. They’re very grim and nihilistic and they set up the conceit of “The chatbot is talking about chatbots but also talking about us WHAAAT” which is fine but they aren’t about the afterlife at all. They’re all setup describing regular life.

    I had a hard time coming up with a title too, and I’m not sure I landed on one I like. I want to keep the structure of “title is the prompt, body is the response”, but as I’m writing this I feel like I’m talking myself into cutting the title and everything after stanza 2 and trying to find the focus more clearly.

    I also like the transition out of stanza 1, and I love stanza 2. There is something very funny about a chatbot speaking over-confidently about death and the afterlife, because that is the only way humans can ever talk about death and the afterlife. None of us know. Even people who have clinically died are extremely unreliable reporters. We’re all just scared and confused and trying to comfort each other the best we know how, which is not well.

    I like parts of stanza 5. I tried some, for lack of a better term, “artsy” sentences that are hard for me to parse but I appreciate them once I do. Fun trivia: And what was am will then be was. started its life as a constellation of editing errors that happened to look kind of nice once I examined it, so I massaged it into its current form. The line And what was will be lost. was written to echo the former line, but I wish the structure matched more exactly. I had my reasons for making the latter line shorter but I cannot recall what they were. If I had to guess, I think it was that I had a hard time making And what was will be lost. structurally similar to And what was am will then be was., but I was too in love with And what was am will then be was. to consider changing that one.

    Stanza 6, already covered how tonally different it feels, but as a standalone stanza I enjoy it. The structure is… there, but it’s pretty inconsistent, in a way that doesn’t feel clear and intentional to me. I placed commas intuitively as I wrote, and I think there were a few more in the first draft, then I took all but one of them out. I think I tend to overuse commas so I appreciate the instinct, but I’m not sure I achieved the effect I was going for there.

    Ok that’s about all I can think for now.

    P.S.

    As I write this, the thought that hovers behind my conscious mind is

    “Oh, my god, get over yourself you self-important windbag!”

    Just wanted to write it out. We’re doing poetry, the selves writing and the selves reading are the only important parts of poetry, the rest is just aesthetics. In matters of poetry, it is OK to treat your silly selves importantly.