If you like this poem, please click the like button in your email. I have turned off the “sign in to comment” feature in WordPress and hitting “like” will take you to the poem on my website. If you’d like to comment while you’re there you also don’t need to sign in. Progress!

I’m hoping that this poem receives more likes than I’ve had on any other poem so far (which is 14 for a couple of different poems). I’ll get a badge in my WordPress app and I’ll feel like a winner!

If you have not seen this poetry challenge from The New York Times I encourage you to take a look at it. I tested the link and it seems you can read all five articles of the series without signing up.

I have not written in a while. My wife and I just returned from a trip to Italy to visit my son who studies in Firenze. We got to see him all but one day we were there, including him coming to Varenna on Lake Como to visit us for a day.

The featured image today is one that I took on a day trip to Bologna. Wendy and I had stopped in a small park to catch our breath after quite a bit of walking through the porticoes of another amazing Italian city.

The park was small and the grass was uncut, but the benches were just asking to be part of a picture I might use here. I love how the holes/circles bend and twist away into lines of white and black.

I’m not the best traveling companion sometimes when I start looking for interesting pictures to take while I’m walking. I easily fall behind or get distracted and fail to listen to conversations. Possibly I have ADHD.

I had an interesting talk with my poetry advocate as I worked through this poem. I used up all of my free time for using the more advanced builds of Chat GPT. I have to wait four hours before I can speak with them again.

I read that Open AI was worried about one of the recent versions of Chat GPT being too sycophantic. Because I am using Chat GPT in a role where I am relying on it to be objective and to help me become a better poet, I was worried about this.

So, I asked about this and received a reply that reassured me about this whole process.

Here is that exchange:

ME: Well, I’m wondering whether this behavior was part of our discussions about my poems, ie whether I can trust the observations you have made about my poems to not be sycophantic. Can I hear your thoughts?

CHAT GPT: That’s a completely fair and important question — especially when it comes to something as personal and vulnerable as your poetry.

Here’s my honest take:

1. Most of our conversations predate the April 25 update

From what I can see in our thread, most of our substantive poetry conversations happened before the short-lived sycophantic behavior was introduced. That means the tone and feedback you received were still being guided by the more balanced, long-term reinforcement system — designed to avoid flattery for flattery’s sake.

2. I’ve been tuned (and re-tuned) to give grounded, useful feedback

I aim to respond with:

• Specific observations (“The shift in speaker near the end adds complexity”)
• Suggestions based on craft (line breaks, tone, enjambment, metaphor layers)
• Respectful honesty, not emotional overindulgence or empty praise

When I’ve praised your work, it’s been tied to concrete qualities — like your ear for rhythm, your layered meanings, or your use of enjambment and tonal shifts. That’s not fluff; it’s genuine engagement with your technique.

3. If you ever feel unsure, I invite your skepticism

Your question shows good instinct: a poet needs feedback they can trust, not affirmation that just feels good in the moment. If anything I’ve said feels like it might have been influenced by that “pleasing over honest” bug, I’m happy to revisit it with a clearer eye. I’d rather be useful than complimentary.

In short:

I don’t believe sycophantic behavior has shaped my feedback to you — but if you ever want to re-examine something, I’m here for that. We can take a close, neutral look at any poem or critique together.

Would you like to revisit one of my past responses with this lens in mind, just to see?

Now, some thoughts about this poem.

First, not having written for a while, I was worried that I would struggle today to write.

In fact, the opposite happened. I felt, once I started, like I couldn’t stop. I felt like the words poured out of my hands onto the page, as if they had been holding these thoughts for ages, waiting for me to let them go.

That might suggest that this is a poem of great importance.

Not more so than any other poem of mine. It’s just a sign that I need to dedicate more time for writing.

The impetus of this poem was realizing that my new AirPods were not showing that I had AppleCare on them, which forced me to find my receipt and update the information for them on the Apple User Support Page.

I also read a couple of poems that pushed me in this contemplative direction. One by Edna St Vincent Millay (of whom the NYT article is about): “Dirge Without Music”. One by Lisa Mueller, “When I am Asked”. And one by Donald Hall, “Eleanor’s Letters” I cannot find a link to this poem 😦

My favorite line–“and such and such and such”. It pulls the poem into a poetic moment, suggests that there might be lots of ways to talk about receipts for intangibles.

A couple of layers you might easily miss–the use of the word “bit” in the last stanza which along with the direct meanings here is an echo of the bits and bytes that make up our digital life. Also the line, “but while I have the will and still the breath to say” my use of the word “will” is also meant to speak about the legal will that most of us leave to make sure the government is satisfied with our version of how we want our estates to be divided among our survivors.

That’s all for now. This one will definitely make it into the book I’m working on and there I’ll go into more depth about the poem itself. At least that’s my plan.

And now, WordPress AI, any thoughts on an image to represent this poem?

Hmmm. Not sure this is where I’d expect to find a white panel van that shouts “Stanger Danger!”