I.

In triumph proceeded the potent victor

Garlanded and praised by an admiring throng

The laurel wreath was light upon his brow

And his train of conquered flags was long.

Behind him sat a public slave,

A conquered foe, with degradation grim

Upon his head a circlet of steel--

The symbol that he now belonged to him.

"Memento mori," said the conquered slave,

"Remember death," as the laurel swayed.

The crowd heard not; they never saw—

The hero's end, nor conquering blade.

II.

The Pharaohs made monuments to consecrate debts,

The Sphinx's countenance broods even now on cheated death,

While Osiris feasts in starless halls and Set usurps the throne--

All for the want of gold to fill their tombs,

All for the love of life they could not live.

The stars' indifference hasn't changed since then:

The cold celestial logic holds us in its sway.

We love only what we destroy or betray:

Our whole supply of warmth we give away,

And what we keep we break by giving in.

We are our own excuses, and our only blame--

We haunt ourselves with ghosts that will not die,

Erect pyramids of bills we cannot pay,

And curse the gods who will not intervene.

We live as if our end were not in sight,

Yet when it comes we beg for extra time--

But all they'll offer is a pair of coins

One eye to pay the boatman to take us home,

One to guarantee we don't return.

III.

If to music were set my stripling years,

The notes would sound of laughter, light and clear;

The days would string together in a row

Like beads of crystal on an ocean floor.

The years would flow like water in a stream,

Reflecting back the sunlight in a dream;

And days would dance together in the night,

Like fireflies flickering in the summer light.

But now I near life's last autumn leaf,

And winter's breath is on the air;

The music of youth fades into memory,

The dirge of death is sounding in my ear.

IV.

I saw a winter branch bend under the snow

A broken bough cradling a blanket of white.

It looked like something good should come of it,

This little marriage of weight and fragility;

I expected the branch to hold, The snow to give.

But they both let go instead,

And I was left with only the memory

Of that short union of opposites,

And the question of what it is we owe

To beauty, when beauty lets us down.

V.

A fawn that charging sets to flight the thrush,

And breaks the spider's web with wanton play,

Bounding o'er brambles and low-hanging fruit,

Darting between trees in chase of butterflies--

All this I see when I behold my love.

She is the very image of joy and life,

bounding through the brush with careless grace.

Her laughter is the music of the forest, and her eyes flash with mischievous delight.

She is nature incarnate, and I am enamored of her wild beauty.

VI.

Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dweller's dive.

Fate is heavier than a mound of earthly ore.

Grief is sharper than a sword with battle-tested edge.

Sorrow is swifter than a wave that crests the shore.

The coldest heralds bring winter's frosty breath.

Mighty eagles soar on high, never bowing to the ground;

Proud lions rule all other creatures with roars that echo through the land.

But Man must face his end alone, set apart from others by Death's call—

For none can cheat or outrun fate, once it has been decided by the Norns.

They weave and yearn at Yggdrasil's roots,

The three great sisters of destiny.

What is to be, will be; what was, has been;

And little may we mortals do but wait and wonder at their decree.

VII.

Dictionary

Verbose mausoleum of mute grief,

Its pages brim with buried words,

Its spine creaks brittle with the weight

Of all that we have left unsaid.

She was an archaeologist of the odd

Excavating the forgotten and the lost

She once gave voice to the undefined

But now lies wordless and fossilized.

This is her epitaph: unspoken thoughts

Dance in silence on the edge of words

Eulogy for a forgotten tongue

Reliquary of language long dead.

VIII.

The day you made your mark in stone,

My heart was yours and all your own.

The night you showed me how to fly,

I knew that I would never die.

But now your stone is cold and grey,

And all my hopes have flown away.

The night has lost its stars for me,

And you are just a memory.

IX.

As he sat beneath the yew he saw

the sadness of Earth's creatures,

the stricken deer upon the plain,

the bird with broken wings,

the rabbit dying in the snare.

He beheld them all, and didn't care.

When at last he rose to leave,

he found that he was old,

His bones were stiff, his hair was grey.

He heard the wind in withered trees,

the sound of dying leaves.

The creatures watched until he'd gone

how his back framed the setting sun.

X.

Youth into the distance fades

O'er troubled seas and stormy shores

To find a home beyond the waves

And lighthouse beams that guide them still.

The foaming crests are white with foam

As restless spirits seek to cross

The vast eternal watery plain--

In search of knowledge, love, and loss.

The siren's song lures them astray

To perilous reefs where ships lie wrecked;

So many lives are cast away--

But youth will sail on, unafraid.

XI.

Before the battle lines were trenched

Beneath your eyes and mine

We were so young and unafraid

Of love or death or time.

Before the cannons roared

And smoke obscured the sky,

We held each other close and swore

To never say goodbye.

After the guns fell silent

And dust settled on the ground,

We found we were still holding tight-

Love had kept us bound.

But between us now yawns no man's land,

Fenced with barbed wire and fear.

Love cannot conquer all, it seems-

But we held each other dear.

XII.

He peered out over his furnace

To see the world he'd made

Ziggurats of twisted metal

The products of his trade.

He sat above the titans

Who toiled in heat and smoke

And at his knees were mortals

Who trembled at his stroke.

He was the God of the Machines,

The spark in circuit boards

The lifeblood of the factory

The power in the cords.

He set the clock to running

And the engine to its song

And in the grinding of gears

He heard the people's groan.

They cried out in their sorrows,

They asked for peace and love

But all he saw were switches

And all he heard was "OFF".

They asked him for salvation

But he had none to give

He was the bringer of order

But not the will to live.

They pleaded for compassion

But he could not comprehend

He was an artificer;

They were not his to mend.

They begged for understanding

But he just gazed ahead

He was the master of all things

But not the life they led.

But then one day he paused

And in the silence heard

The echo of a distant laughter

That rang throughout the world.

Laughter from the ancients

Who knew him well by name

And from the children playing

Who saw him in their games.

The titans there below him

The mortals at his feet

They all looked up in wonder

As he began to speak:

"I am Haphaestus, the maker

The forger of your fate

I give you what you ask for

But is not yours to take.

I give you what you yearn for

But it is not my gift

The thing that you most desire

Is what I cannot give.

I can give you power

But it's useless without will

I can't give you purpose

Unless your purpose is to kill."

And with those words he descended

Into the children's game

And after him the anguished cry

Of Prometheus in flames.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5196456&forum_id=2#45225539)

it is a little bit stiff about keeping sense units to whole lines. only enjambment that stuck out to me was "And the question of what it is we owe / To beauty". wonder if you could tweak it to include more interesting line breaks.

interesting experiment. i heard a playwright say he wants to start doing stuff like shows where parts of the script is generated each night from some sort of algorithm, such that some elements are standard but some are semi-random. you might be on a cutting edge here.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5196456&forum_id=2#45229160)

To produce them, I came up with the first line and general ideas for themes and then let the GPT-3 suggest candidates. I only lightly cleaned them up.

The line breaks in part are not showing up due to xoxo format. But yeah, you could train it to do all sorts of stuff.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5196456&forum_id=2#45229442)

I again didn't do training -- rather, I prompted it with the type of poem I wanted, some of the imagery, and the names of a few poets, then wrote the first line and refreshed until I got good results. (That is, I'd refresh until a completion was decent for a few lines, then edit them then refresh again, sometimes seeding it with a new first line if it got stuck.)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5196456&forum_id=2#45232143)

A song of hope for all who heard.

His melody rose up through the trees

Singing sweetly of vic'try won.

The men at arms heard not his song

Comrades in battle, they were glory-bound.

Charnel-house, crimson blood-soaked

ground, nesting house for carrion now.

The hermit thrush sang unabashed, composed

A far-too-chipper funeral dirge.

Muttering under the yoke men did crawl,

As if dancing to his encouragements.

Comrades' bones bleached and

Dry, hermit thrush still sings nearby.

Only carrion-birds heeded his call,

In the end - only death could reply.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5196456&forum_id=2#45344265)

Crash of oars singing Valkyries'

song, I sit and listen, ne'er

tiring. On prow of ship,

Voyaging to Hel, land of the dead.

Nornir spin their web,

Fate is woven, cannot be shirked.

Odin decides who will die in war,

And Valkyries ferry them to his hall.

I close my eyes and let the rhythm flow,

Drifting away on this paean of woe.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5196456&forum_id=2#45344311)