Clarity Is Not My Forte

September 26, 2024

(by Cobber ‘Stumpy’ Malley)

I know I am another person’s thought,
a whisper, a disembodied voice

with no authentic self. I know
I am an offshoot of an offshoot,

shadow of a shadow in an age
where shadows loom large.

Still, I reach for clarity
like a plant for sunlight,

reach for sense, for meaning,
for purpose. I am human in that way.

Confusion has me in its grip,
the many-headed hydra of self-doubt.

If I am not real, what is?
What if what I know is a lie,

if I am not even a thought within a thought
but a bot’s unthinking emanation,

a construct of a construct,
a fiction of a fiction?

Cobber ‘Stumpy’ Malley claims an undefined genealogical connection to Ern Malley who was fictitiously born over a century ago in 1918. He imagines himself as a man from the bush but in fact has rarely left suburbia, a fact that his constant wearing of an Akubra hat and boots cannot hide. Biographical details are sketchy, but he may not be who he says he is.

David Adès is an Australian poet and the host of a monthly poetry podcast series, Poets’ Corner.

Art by Bakken & Baeck, visualizing how multimodal models understand a users input and generate an output, created as part of the Visualising AI project launched by Google DeepMind.

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