Darken Souls

It’s all too common to have one’s inner
voice speak directly to you about another
person. In these cases the voice’s message
is one that could have only originated
within our own hearts – it sounds like
another’s words in your mind, but in fact
the underlying thought is entirely a
product of your own darkness. In such a
situation, when a voice calls to you
directly, the first instinct is probably to
respond in some fashion, either to reject
or to listen, and to go along with the
voice. That seems counterintuitive, since
the voice was only made to speak directly
to you – yet the experience can feel
exactly as though you are hearing
someone else speaking. What this tells
you is that when your heart has gone
silent, your sense of self is so removed
and distant that even listening can be very
difficult. If this is you, please ask the
voices if they are aware of this. There
should be a definite silence.

Pink PDF

In 2010 an image was posted on the popular image sharing website Flickr
with a quote taken from the song ‘PDA’: “If the best life comes from
pain / I want something to remember I can die”. It was widely reported
that this photo had been doctored and turned into an erotic depiction of
one of the characters from Gremlins. Even though its provenance is not
clear, people began creating and uploading similar images for
entertainment purposes all across the web. What was particularly
interesting about this original image was how little it contained of life
after the point of deletion, especially the very brief moment before it was
suddenly blown up in a series of digital illusions. Some fans even used
the meme’s origins for their various forms of artistic performance. And,
since the subject would become so deeply embedded in a social
landscape often defined by its most bizarre extremes, there seemed little
reason it would ever be taken seriously. This all changed in October of
2016 when an anonymous tweet went viral and instantly received
worldwide media attention: it was the first time on earth a single word of
such massive import was completely stripped of the possibility of ever
becoming meaningful. Memeified, then deleted at the same moment its
use as an inversion of our traditional culture took effect. That was about
three weeks before Gremlins 3 opened across the United States.

These poems were composed with the assistance of Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2), an open-source neural network created by OpenAI in February 2019.

Sam Riviere is the author of three poetry books, 81 Austerities, Kim Kardashian's Marriage, and After Fame, and a novel, Dead Souls (2021), as well as several limited-edition titles. He runs the micropublisher If a Leaf Falls Press.