I asked this question to the Generative Intelligence, Claude:  how does one facilitate a poetic life in oneself and others?

One of the answers was to share inspiration and to ponder questions, big and small.  This draft poem is an example of that.  One image that keeps rising in my poetic life, an inspiration, is the porch swing at home.  It is the big fat koi in the pond of my imagination.  I continue to roll over the image in my poetry.  That is part of what a poetic life is, a recursion into the glub-glub-glub-speak of my fish unconscious.  And it is also the realization that this game is not just worth the candle, it is the candle.

Here is my latest excursion:

An empty swing

The empty swing
is a prelude to something
I know not,
an archetype of my attention
that keeps returning to
‘Who’?
As in: one day
the swing will sway
without thee
or me
or both or neither.
This empty is legion
and fills us all
as we decant ourselves
into that swing,
an acknowledgement of
that memory,
returning and choral,
reiterating
like an eye floater.

So…
we let the world come to us
in that swing
in short oscillations,
emptiness together,
a possible future spilling forth
for that day only.
How could it all come back to this
image?
I feel the empty
making space for the sunrise-coming-day
and whatever blazes mark the trail.

We turn to each other,
ghosts but not soul-less
and say together to each other,
“Let’s take a walk.”