1st draft, minor changes 
Overheard

my favorite uncle and his brother
(that’s my father) talking
in the kitchen Sunday
about Vietnam:

“Thing is,” my father’s cracking
voice, “if you want an omelet, well
you’ve got to break some eggs.”

Favorite Uncle grunted, downed
his drink and slapped my father
hard, and it was almost Christmas, so I knew

it was the truth. Next morning, I heard my mother
mention “omelet,” so I flanked the sleeping kitchen,
climbed into the fridge

and went to work. Nobody
was happy. That’s when I learned
not to trust a word a soldier says.

The original AI poems: 

ChatGPT 
We wake as questions wearing skin,
breath stitching light into our lungs,
a fragile rhythm borrowed
from a universe that forgets nothing
and forgives everything slowly.

We build small meanings out of dust—
a name, a touch, a place to return to—
though every road dissolves behind us
like a thought we almost understood.

To be human is to reach anyway:
through doubt, through distance, through time,
to hold another fleeting heartbeat
and call it real
before it slips back into mystery.

-
Gemini
We are a strange and heavy architecture,
built of wet clay and staggering desire,
holding the universe in temporary fracture,
caught right between the bedrock and the fire.
To be a human is to carry clocks
inside a pulse that wants to live forever,
to build a fortress out of cardboard boxes
and map the stars while drowning in the river.
We gather grief like firewood for the winter,
we weave our grandest tapestries from pain,
and pull from tender palms the smallest splinter,
only to stand and love and bleed again.
We are the only beasts that weep at beauty,
who lose our sleep over a tomorrow we can't see,
tethered to flesh, to gravity, to duty,
yet desperate, wild, and aching to be free.
No map is true, no destination certain,
we stumble forward, fragile and sublime,
singing our syntax through a heavy curtain,
leaving our footprints on the shores of time.

-

Claude

What the Body Knows

You wake already mid-sentence,
a thought still finishing itself
from a dream you can't quite hold—
and this is the first miracle:
that consciousness returns at all,
that you are, again, someone.

To be human is to carry a weather system
behind the ribs, unpredictable,
sun breaking through an hour after
you'd given up on sun.
It's grief arriving without an appointment.
It's laughing so hard at a joke
you forget, for a second, that you'll die.

It's the strange arithmetic of memory—
how a smell can be a time machine,
how a song from a bad year
still knows your name.

It's loving people you can't fix
and being loved by people who can't fix you,
and calling that enough,
and meaning it.

It's the ten thousand small negotiations
between what you want
and what you'll actually do—
the alarm clock, the diet, the apology
you're still working up to.

It's standing in a kitchen at midnight
eating something cold from the fridge,
feeling, for no reason,
briefly and completely alive.

It's knowing you are a temporary arrangement
of borrowed atoms,
and getting a haircut anyway.
Buying the plant that outlives you.
Planning next summer.

This is the trick of it—
not transcending the smallness,
but finding it's enough:
a body, a few decades,
a handful of people who know your face,
one ordinary Tuesday
after another
after another,
somehow, a life.