On a typical flâneurish outing, I take a typical storefront-surrealist pic and later decide to run it by Chat for a short poem in the manner of Gregory Corso. You never know when Chat will hit the jackpot, not to be confused with the William Gibson Jackpot that AI will eventually hit if it gets enough (nuclear) power. The choice of Corso is only because I’d been poking around in Mindfield. Not too big on Corso, really, and Chat’s poem isn’t worth noting—it’s pretty typical—except for its title: “Eye in a Bell Jar.” Of course! It hadn’t even occurred to me that there’s a bell jar in play here.

So never mind the Beats, let’s bring on Plath without further ado, and it’s OK to breathe and Achoo, Daddy-O. Chat, always the cheerful trouper, is up for this one, of course, promising an “incantatory confessional monologue in the manner of Ariel, where Sylvia Plath fuses the external object with psychic revelation.” 

Bell Jar Eye 
Under the dome I live, 
an eye—unblinking, salted with light. 
They have trapped me in a curiosity, 
a carnival glass where breath does not fog, 
where silence rehearses its perfect aria. 

Outside, the cars grind their black teeth. 
Men in jackets pass, their hands in pockets, 
their voices thrown like stones at the air. 
They do not see me. 
Or worse— 
they do, 
and mistake me for decoration. 

I am the iris, the lidless witness, 
I am the nerve pinned to daylight, 
I am the daughter locked in her own weather. 

The leaf stretches its false green tongue 
toward me— 
plastic, yes, but still a parody of touch. 
Nothing reaches. 
Nothing ever reaches. 

The bell jar hums with its own oxygen, 
a tight cold womb where memory curdles: 
hospital sheets, 
electrodes humming like hornets, 
the child I was, crying at glass. 

Do not call it preservation. 
Do not call it art. 
It is a tomb of reflections, 
a cage of sight. 
Even the blink is denied me. 

Well, that’s reliably depressing, but not so bad for a Chat poem, particularly the first three stanzas, which I wouldn’t sneeze at. To truly achieve psychic revelation, however, we’ve gotta BTR it. Let’s do a PLATH conceit, which results in Portuguese (Brazil), Lao, Afrikaans, Thai, and Hebrew (did you mention Jews enough, Sylvia?), before returning to English . . . but, in a BTR first, this will be twice-laundered, the second time putting the first three stanzas at the bottom of the poem, since Bing Translate can’t handle the whole poem at once and apparently cut off the last few lines (“Tongue stuck in my jaw / I can’t bite off more than I can chew“). Still, this doesn’t yield a worthy complete poem, so here’s the nifty new title and what are now the first two stanzas, which can more or less stand up to a boot in the face.

A Flower in Lapel Ware 
Green leaves, like drops of water from a pasture 
by my side— 
Plastic, that’s the truth, but it’s still a gentle way to describe 
Nothing falls 
Nothing fades 
 
A flower in lapel ware, like a chest hard as its own snow 
A cold and thick belly, in memory hard as bone: 
The herbs of your doctor 
An electronic sound like a bell in a pub 
Small children I cry with in a glass 

“Ware” for “wear”? Or is one’s lapel wear itself a ware, and BTR knows it’s punning? The latter, of course. It’s a grinning Cassandra. At any rate, this calls for a “visual-poem version” from Gemini, good old Gem being notorious for textual breakdowns that look like they’ve gone a few rounds with the rack and the screw and have to be stuck together with glue. But not so much this time. Gem took some liberties with the text, but it isn’t quite gobbledygoo. The prompt was simply, “Please lay the following poem over this photo in a manner that will be pleasing to the eye.” I don’t know if Gem got the pun, but since it confined the poem to the bell jar, maybe it did, though it’s hardly pleasing to any other eye.

And what would Chat do with this? It took four tries to get this image. Chat has no problem with textual gobbledygoo, but it doesn’t know how to make text legible over an image. I had to request “screaming yellow.” At the same time, it makes its images with deliberation as they slowly, achingly appear onscreen from the top down as if they were teleporting into your ocular consciousness.

Gem, on the other hand, spits out its image in a flat second like it was a toaster on The Jetsons.