*

The hills curve, undiscovered
a star, two stars, their coronas

The drizzle so faint on my skin
a torrent so faint on my skin

Salt on the wet cobbles –
a cutting reflection on the street

*

Note:

This is the first of a series of short love poems, which I’ve chosen to illustrate by using a free generative art app. I don’t feel the need to attribute credit here since they don’t attribute credit to all the artists and photographers whose work they have used to train their algorithm, totalling countless millions of hours of unpaid labour, though if you were inclined, I’m sure it wouldn’t be too much trouble to find.

To create the illustrations I have used concrete terms from the poems, sometimes introducing other terms from the subtext to induce the kind of style or evoke some element from the fantasy behind each poem I felt was missing without the addition of that term. The idea is to end up with a series of erotic landscapes and still life images which, after being prompted by it, complement and support the text.

I will generate various attempts for each poem and pick the most interesting one, not necessarily the most apt. In the first poem’s illustration I liked the irruption of a kind of fantastic Arabic calligraphy into the sky. Some piece from the training data has laid traces in this piece beyond what I asked of it, and it makes a fitting title card to the series.