It can help you pass your A-levels

Or similar bog-standard tests;

It will cook up birthday verses,

Can sketch some blackbirds in their nests

Or write a decent theme tune for TV.

But Beethoven’s ninth symphony,

The trio from the Rosenkavalier,

Gaugin’s Christs or the Mona Lisa?

Such inspiration it can’t get near.

AI is the service of the bland.

The risk is it will unde...

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Long ago, it was the wife who would push him

-‘These are our sort of people,’ she would say-

To take that job, which he couldn’t manage

And came home each evening utterly spent.

Oh, the ordeal of dinners with the boss

And Councillor Twitface for Sunday tea,

When he would have preferred to mooch around

And watch the football or listen to jazz.

That certain kind of snobb...

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So many lives, so many hopes and dreams,

They all finish loaded on the scrapheap,

Piled high into one moist organic hump,

Where, some decades later, the needy poor

Will hollow out hovels to dodge the cold,

And some bright spark will soon call it recycling

And trumpet this sham as sustainable.

Then celebrities will come, and sleep out,

In self-pleasuring solidarity,

And c...

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