Be sure to use AI when making
your next, I don’t know, meal plan,
for example. Definitely do not call
your friend who loves to cook and ask her
for her favorite recipes or tips or ways
to save time making meals,
because you will end
up talking for longer than you had hoped,
hearing, perhaps, about her father’s cancer
diagnosis or how lonely she’s been or even
what she’s planted in her spring
garden and then lost with the early frost.

And be sure to use AI when planning that next
camping trip, the last one you will take
with this particular child. Definitely do
not text your friend who has fly-fished every
river in Pennsylvania and biked every
backwoods trail, because you might end
up texting back and forth for the rest of the day
or even meeting up late for a beer and hearing
how he has ended each recent night black-out
drunk, or perhaps you’ll hear how his
cousin is an idiot on Facebook or maybe just
that he repaired his own washing machine
and is pretty damn proud of that.

And be sure to use AI when your next child
gets married, so that you can write them
the perfect toast or poem or speech or song
because no one wants to hear your
words, the actual poorly written words
of a parent (you) who changed
hundreds of diapers for said child or fed
them in the middle of the
night from your actual body. Or cried
when they were late home because
you were positive they were dead. We don't
want those words—we’d prefer the sterile
words of a machine that never lived, never
had an original thought, never felt
the pain of miscarriage or broken
relationships or the joy of a friendship restored
or of seeing spring’s first
robin dancing on frost.

And be sure to use AI when working on your next
book or essay or piece of art or photography,
and then smile or even laugh at your own
cleverness when you see how good it is,
and how easy,
because who the hell has time
to work at something, to give time to craft, to
create with their own minds, to spend
years being mediocre. Why do that when
mastery, or at least competency
is so simple
only a good prompt away?

How magnificent
the funeral song our children or contemporaries
will write for us, a song they will make by
taking our obituary and Facebook posts,
plus random quotes from our algorithm,
and feeding them into Chat
or Gemini
or Claude.
The tears that will fall in the face of such
sanitary sweetness!

Be sure to use AI

and while you do I’ll be over here in my 50th
year, my youngest daughter asleep on my chest,
my arm falling asleep because I dare not move
lest I scare away this moment,
lying here melancholy about my older
children moving out and my middle
children no longer needing me, at least
not like they used to, weary about this body
that fails me now in ever increasing ways
that will never be restored. Sighing
over stories I tried to write but never hit
the page the way they felt in my mind.

But isn’t that, my flesh-and-blood friend,
the natural order of things?

the longing for something that could always be
a bit better

or the way that anything
worth doing feels a bit clumsy and painful,
especially at first

or hearing another human voice and somehow
realizing the beauty of life is found in all of these
subtle imperfections