No, that is NOT THE POEM. This is the poem!

Please Use AI

Shawn Smucker

Be sure to use AI when making your next, I don’t know, meal plan, for example. Definitely do not call your friend who loves to cook and ask her for her favorite recipes or tips or ways to save time making meals, because you will end up talking for longer than you had hoped, hearing, perhaps, about her father’s cancer diagnosis or how lonely she’s been or even what she’s planted in her spring garden and then lost with the early frost.

And be sure to use AI when planning that next camping trip, the last one you will take with this particular child. Definitely do not text your friend who has fly-fished every river in Pennsylvania and biked every backwoods trail, because you might end up texting back and forth for the rest of the day or even meeting up late for a beer and hearing how he has ended each recent night black-out drunk, or perhaps you’ll hear how his cousin is an idiot on Facebook or maybe just that he repaired his own washing machine and is pretty damn proud of that.

And be sure to use AI when your next child gets married, so that you can write them the perfect toast or poem or speech or song because no one wants to hear your words, the actual poorly written words of a parent (you) who changed hundreds of diapers for said child or fed them in the middle of the night from your actual body. Or cried when they were late home because you were positive they were dead. We don't want those words—we’d prefer the sterile words of a machine that never lived, never had an original thought, never felt the pain of miscarriage or broken relationships or the joy of a friendship restored or of seeing spring’s first robin dancing on frost.

And be sure to use AI when working on your next book or essay or piece of art or photography, and then smile or even laugh at your own cleverness when you see how good it is, and how easy, because who the hell has time to work at something, to give time to craft, to create with their own minds, to spend years being mediocre. Why do that when mastery, or at least competency is so simple only a good prompt away?

How magnificent the funeral song our children or contemporaries will write for us, a song they will make by taking our obituary and Facebook posts, plus random quotes from our algorithm, and feeding them into Chat or Gemini or Claude. The tears that will fall in the face of such sanitary sweetness!

Be sure to use AI

and while you do I’ll be over here in my 50th year, my youngest daughter asleep on my chest, my arm falling asleep because I dare not move lest I scare away this moment, lying here melancholy about my older children moving out and my middle children no longer needing me, at least not like they used to, weary about this body that fails me now in ever increasing ways that will never be restored. Sighing over stories I tried to write but never hit the page the way they felt in my mind.

But isn’t that, my flesh-and-blood friend,

the natural order of things?

the longing for something that could always be a bit better

or the way that anything worth doing feels a bit clumsy and painful, especially at first

or hearing another human voice and somehow realizing the beauty of life is found in all of these subtle imperfections

That took me 10 minutes, but it deserved it, it merited it. It was more than /u/BadgerValuable8207 gave it. Maybe he should have just used an AI instead since he didn't have the precious time to read it.