CHAT GPT

by Harold Oberman

AI-generated image

AI ate my sonnet.

Gulped it down / Digested it,

Spit it out in reconstituted iambs.

I want to slip it some clichés,

Gunk up its system with pablum,

Make its metaphors as mediocre as mine.

Oh, don’t taunt me you rhyming clock,

You metronome, you precise pizza.

You took away my love of form,

Translated poetry into pi.

Eat it all my clever friend.

Harold Oberman is a poet and lawyer writing in Charleston, S.C. He has appeared recently in The New Verse News, The Free State Review, An Anthology of Low Country Poets, and has been honored by the Poetry Society of South Carolina for, among other things, a sonnet. However, he has given up on that after a now antiquated version of AI generated the following poem, with minor prodding, in 3 seconds:

Oh gravity, force that keeps us all in place,

That pulls us down and holds us to the earth,

A power strong and constant in its pace,

That gives our feet a steady, solid girth.

But horses, with their grace and beauty wild,

Seem not to feel the pull of gravity's might,

They gallop free, their manes and tails unfurled,

As if to mock the laws that bind us tight.

But though they seem to fly, they too are bound,

By gravity's unyielding grip on all,

And though they run with freedom all around,

They too must fall, when gravity's call.

So let us strive to soar, like horses do,

But always keep in mind, gravity's rule.

INFLATION

by Harold Oberman

This poem doesn’t go as far as it used to.
In the past, twelve lines would wrap it up,
Say all we wanted to say,
But now each word buys a little less,
Each syllable strains to make a complete sound,
And we’re left wanting,

Hungering in the margins,
Left short each stanza,
Straining to make it work,
Straining to just get by
In an economy
With a fixed amount of words
But extravagant combinations.


Harold Oberman is a poet and lawyer writing in Charleston, S.C. He has appeared recently in The New Verse News, The Free State Review, An Anthology of Low Country Poets, and has been honored by the Poetry Society of South Carolina.

THE AMERICAN BOOK OF THE DEAD

XXIX.  May 14, 2020 85,884

by Harold Oberman

I want to sit here and breathe my own air;
My den is my paper panic attack bag—
     Rational fears.
Remind me next pandemic to ostrich cliche
Deep enough to fill my head with sand,
Deep enough to avoid CDC science,
So deep I’ll run the savanna
When I emerge, oblivious to predators.

Now they’re forcing us out,
Opening up.
A trial here, a meeting there,
Left behind if you don’t attend.
Just out of their eggs
Join the trail of tiny sea turtles
Trying to make it to the sea.


Harold Oberman is a poet and lawyer trying make a living, and live, in Charleston, S.C.

THE AMERICAN BOOK OF THE DEAD

by Harold Oberman

“Radical Approaches to Social Distancing” by Carolita Johnson, The New Yorker, March 22, 2020

X.  April 10, 2020 16,690

Ars Poetica

I feel guilty for writing something beautiful.
I try to tone it down,
Replace the lilt with hard t’s,
Crash consonants like cars,
Try to remember what landscape is, or was
In this still life.
There are few active verbs
On this couch.  No
Sensible line breaks as I go insane
In isolation.
Hiss.
I swear if I ever get to a bar again
I won’t have a pen and I’m going
To touch my face, shake your hand
And share a shot.
Is there deep meaning in that?
Death to metaphors.
“Live your life as if you’re already dead”
Said Charles Wright, quoting Che Guevara
Or a Japanese coin.
As I was, I wish I could.

Harold Oberman is a poet and lawyer writing in Charleston, S.C.  The above is excerpted from a longer work which may, or may not, ever see the light of day.  He has appeared in TheNewVerse.News and The Free State Review.

IN QUARANTINE WITH AN OLD AMERICAN CLOTHES DRYER

by Harold Oberman

Upstairs I hear the clothes in the dryer turning and falling,

Zippers staccato on inside the drum,

Rhythmless but constant like the crickets outside,

Not quite music,

                           not quite noise.

The heating coil's broken so clothes tumble

In hope movement will dry them—

Post pond dogs running loops until Fall,

Tongues out, fur against air—

In theory water losing its grasp and dripping off

From the sheer persistence of an appliance

Electric and half-crippled.

In another hour, after the sun cycles again below the horizon,

After the shadows caucus as always and proclaim it night,

Just after the evening news,

I'll walk up the stairs, check the progress,

Drape half-damp shirts on chairs like flags on coffins,

Let the thick socks rotate on,

And say to myself I should get this damn thing fixed,

This old rotating drum with revolutions grown cold.

Harold Oberman is a lawyer and poet locked down in Charleston, South Carolina.

PRIMARY RANT

by Harold Oberman

Graphic via Nikki McWatters

At this exact moment
It is time to put your sonnets
      On hold.
No lyric musings
Until the Republic is secure,
Until the Senate gains sanity,
Until Justice does justice,
Until November.

“There is a criminal in the White House
Who bullies foreign powers to frame his political rivals”
Does not fucking rhyme with anything
So don’t even try,
At least for now.
“There is a criminal in the White House
Who pardons his cronies who fixed the last election”
Is not a simile, not even a metaphor,
So don’t get clever with it
At least for now.
“There is a criminal in the White House
Who foments hate for political gain”
Is not in iambic, nor even trochaic, so just say it,
At least for now.

Pick up your pen
And jab it in the back of someone’s hand
Goddammit
If they say, “I’m not going to vote on that day,
November Third.”
Pick up your pen
And jab it in the back of someone’s hand
Goddammit
If they say “It just doesn’t matter.”

Scream before you write the lyric.
Howl before you write the sonnet.
And whisper truth to your neighbor.

Harold Oberman is a lawyer and writer living in the midst of the South Carolina Primary. His work has appeared in the TheNewVerse.News  and in the Free State Review.

THE MOON 2018

by Harold Oberman

December 24, 2018 marks the 50th anniversary of NASA's  Earthrise photograph. Harold Oberman was young enough when the Apollo missions filled him with optimism, but on earth, circumstances have changed. His poems have recently appeared in TheNewVerse.News and are forthcoming in the Free State Review.

USA?

child


























                                                mother


Harold Oberman lives in Charleston, S.C.

LUNCH MONOLOGUE

by Harold Oberman

The A-1 China Super Buffet lacks knives
And we are no longer the leader of the free world.
I’m not sure what disturbs me more.
I imagine an incident at the buffet,
A butter knife attack long ago,
And the owners swearing off the utensil,
Or a loutish mule at the G-7 Summit
Bucking in invective, stamping his wingtips,
Flaring his nose, and bolting for Singapore.
Certainly, the butter knife attack I made up—
It’s probably a cultural thing, allowing forks
Instead of chopsticks is as far as they’ll bend—
But the leader of the former leader
Of the free world is somehow real
And we can’t take his knives away, not yet,
And he’ll be at the feed trough braying for his steak
Well-done, gums exposed, totally uninformed
That mules usually eat hay.

Harold Oberman is a lawyer and poet working and writing in Charleston, S.C.  Most Mondays he can be found at the A-1 China Super Buffet.

ROYAL WEDDING

by Harold Oberman

It’s days like this
When I’m glad I’m not
Britain’s Poet Laureate.
Appointed by the monarch,
Expected to write verse
About significant national occasions,
There’d be an expectation I’d have to write about this.
Oh Lord
And Ladies,
Commoners and Kings,
Take me to the Tower.

I’m content to be
The self-appointed
Poet Laureate Of My House
And write about
Significant occasions there:

How the AC clicked on for the first time all Spring
Filled the upstairs bedroom with cold air
Soon confused by the ceiling fan
Into a current or eddy or breeze
That stirred the blank pages of this pad Into a rustling call for a blue pen;

How a random bee somehow got inside again,
Buzzed against the window pane until it dropped
Onto the inside sill, exhausted and wing-broken
From, I guess, its quest to get back to the hive
To produce honey or such, or to mate,

Or to meet the Queen.

Harold Oberman is the Poet Laureate of 25-d Montagu Street.  He likes pomp, but not necessarily circumstance or monarchy.

INTERSTITIUM

by Harold Oberman

With all that’s known about human anatomy, you wouldn’t expect doctors to discover a new body part in this day and age. But now, researchers say they’ve done just that: They’ve found a network of fluid-filled spaces in tissue that hadn’t been seen before. These fluid-filled spaces were discovered in connective tissues all over the body, including below the skin’s surface; lining the digestive tract, lungs and urinary systems; and surrounding muscles, according to a new study detailing the findings, published today (March 27) in the journal Scientific Reports. Image source: Getty Images via Scientific American, March 27, 2018.

The hidden waterway beneath our skin
Flows freely.  For the moment
It's an organ unburdened by metaphor, unlike the heart.

Undiscovered rivers in the modern age are rare.
Deep in the Amazon perhaps, hidden from satellites
By tree cover and a murky flow
That mimics the surrounding underbrush,
Banked by birds so exotic they were indexed one time and forgotten,
There is a tributary no one has seen.

It hid in plain sight, the interstitium.
The chemicals used to study the skin
Destroyed it.  Dissected, it collapsed from the weight of its discovery.


Harold Oberman is a lawyer and poet living and writing in Charleston, S.C.

SCHOOL SHOOTING

by Harold Oberman

Kentucky School Shooting Is 11th of Year. It’s Jan. 23. Clockwise from top left: Wake Forest University campus on the morning of Jan. 21, after a fatal shooting the night before; emergency crews responded to Marshall County High School after a fatal shooting on Jan. 23 in Benton, Ky.; law enforcement personnel gathered outside a high school in Italy, Tex., after a shooting on Jan. 22; police officers at the Net Charter School in New Orleans on Jan. 22 after a shooting. Credit Clockwise from top left: Ben Powell; Ryan Hermens/The Paducah Sun, via Associated Press; KDFW Fox4, via Associated Press; Emily Kask. —The New York Times, January 23, 2018

Two students dead, 12 other people wounded
in Kentucky high school shooting. 
—Headline in The Washington Post, January 23, 2018

Who even writes the story now?
Headline: “School Shooting . . .”
Is there a designee at a desk in the obit department
That fills in the blanks?
Blank dead.
Blank wounded.
Blank rounds from
Blank automatic weapons.
Insert rampage or chaos.
Insert tragedy and heartbreak and close-knit and unbelievable and backpack and student and child.
How do you describe the indescribable?
Form 2018.
Blank this shit.
Headline: “School Shooting . . .”
The ellipsis trail off like bodies.


Harold Oberman is a lawyer and poet living and writing in Charleston, S.C. His work has recently appeared in TheNewVerse.News.

THE SENTENCING OF MICHAEL SLAGER

by Harold Oberman

Judy Scott holds a photo of her son Walter Scott on Thursday after Michael Slager, a former police officer who shot and killed Mr. Scott in 2015 after a traffic stop, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for violating Mr. Scott’s civil rights. Credit: Credit Randall Hill/Reuters via The New York Times, December 7, 2017

I went to middle school with him,
Walter Scott.  He was a year behind
And, as to his details, I don't remember.
I just don't remember.

I pulled out an old Annual after the shooting.
Wallace Middle School.  New Horizons. 1979.
My parents sent me there against the advice of their peers.
"Violence," they said, "had happened,"
The past year.  Middle school violence
In the Seventies.  A big brawl, perhaps a stabbing
At the most.  So antique.

38 years later, Walter Scott’s shot in the back.
The cop got 20 years.
Violence does not have a half-life
That diminishes over time
Or a blood-red glow that grows dimmer,
Though we wish it did.

He wears a large-collared shirt in the Annual.
I can't tell its colors.
The photos, back then, were all black and white.

Harold Oberman is a lawyer working and writing in Charleston, SC. His first poem was published in middle school and, subsequently, he has had his work published in TheNewVerse.News.

RENOVATIONS, THIRTY YEARS LATER

by Harold Oberman 

“The poet Emma Lazarus, moved by this unique symbol of the love of liberty, wrote a very special dedication 100 years ago.” —Ronald Reagan, in his Remarks on the Lighting of the Torch of the Statue of Liberty in New York, New York, July 3, 1986

We coated your flame in 24 carat gold
Pointed our spotlights at it and moved on,
A gilded reflection, not a beacon.

Mother of Exiles, we never enlightened you:

Now in our dark night
A man denied light makes fire
And that light concentrated on a point no longer illuminates.
It ignites.

Harold Oberman is a lawyer working and writing in Charleston, SC. He went to the University of Virginia where he took full advantage of the poets teaching in the English Department. The poems he wrote as an undergraduate that were deemed too political are now, in retrospect, not political enough.

MATRYOSHKA DOLL

by Harold Oberman


Lawyers peel off the layers
Of suited smiling dolls,
The next one smaller,
Until they find
An orange
Infant
Tsar.

Harold Oberman is a lawyer working and writing in Charleston, SC.  He went to the University of Virginia where he took full advantage of the poets teaching in the English Department.