Seriously

I

You can’t of course expect to be taken seriously
unless you can drink 9 marines under the table
and walk off with the lady. Waiters will know
and show you to the place Bogart once sat

or would have had the place been open
when he was in this world. A streak of unbottled
grey works well, but isn’t a must. Ditto
a hat. Nor do you actually have to exist

except in our haunted minds, either as someone
we’ve always wanted to be, or as a symbol
of everything wrong about the past - its double

standards, racism (why was the waiter
black?) etc. Or because your way of saying goodbye
is how we always wanted it to end.


II

Of the two versions of Oscar Wilde’s I like
the one which has him looking at the wallpaper
in his room in the Hôtel d’Alsace, and quipping
one or the other of us has got to go –

you know it’s true even if it isn’t.
I’ve got mine ready: it’s about bloody time!’.
I’ve been saving them up for years: you won’t
get anything out of me thereafter –

I’ll hold on till the rest really is silence . . .
Rest?  In peace, we say, as though a kind of sleep
and not extinction – the kind that Larkin feared,

the unimaginable nothingness which mocks
all human effort, love, compassion, care
and comforting trite rhymes, as mere hot air.

III

In my Oxford days, I met an American
studying our perception of time. His thesis was
that if one lived to the ripe old Biblical age
of three score years and ten, we were half way through

(in terms of how time felt) by 18. And yes
looking back at childhood, we can all remember
the eternity between Christmas and Easter
which now passes in a blink. And yes

the lesson for those as old as me (imagining
a life as just a day) is that’s the clock
on 2355, or even later.

But if time is linked not just to space (Einstein)
but also to consciousness, then consciousness
and space too must be linked. What does that mean?

IV

Is this a poem? God knows – I don’t. If
He exists. If She exists. If
I exist in any meaningful sense
other than whoever it is who’s writing this,

who’s written by this. But it’s early morning here
(wherever here is) and I can hear the rain
attempting to drown the world. Perhaps this time
it will, and whales will party where today

we strut our stuff, Now that’s a phrase I like –
as though we were peacocks or turkeys, and maybe we are
but I can’t believe they share such consciousness

or are looking for words rather than something to eat
when they pick and peck, or spread their feathers knowing
nothing matters except this here, this now.

V

This poem was written by ChatGPT.
This poem wasn’t written by ChatGPT.
Assuming we’ve decided it’s a poem . . .
A year ago, I asked the thing to write

a Petrarchan sonnet, à la Thomas Wyatt.
It turned out something plodding in a pat
Shakespearean rhyme-scheme– and had the cheek
to tell me it had opted for blank verse

and enquire if I had anything to say
so it could do better in future. I refrained,
hoping no one would ever put it right

and that such errors would endure till time
called time. Till then, I’d write such rag-bag rubbish
you’d know it was me. I’d know I was me. A deal?

Tom Vaughan

If you have any thoughts about this poem,  Tom Vaughan  would like to hear them