A predictable poem

My predictive text is a bit clever. Maybe a bit too clever. It’s no longer happy with guessing the word I’m typing. It now wants to guess the next word that I will type, before I’ve started to type it. If I type “choc”, it guesses I want to type “chocolate”.  Fair enough. But once it has typed in “chocolate” for me, it’s already suggesting that “chip” is the next word. And once I accept that, it suggests that the next word is “cookie”. Maybe it’s been secretly monitoring my food intake and knows how much I like chocolate chip cookies.

Anyway, it’s spooky. It’s not even necessary to type anything. Without typing anything at all, it suggests the first word of a sentence. It has 3 suggestions. “I”, “The” and “It”. So I could just pick one of those. And then it will select another word. And another. So I could write an entire paragraph with predicted words, so let me just try that:

The next day I will not have to do that. It has been a while and I don’t know what to say. I love the way you can get a new phone case and that the next day you’re going to be able to see the new update. I have no idea what the next few weeks and months and the rest of the year before that is not an issue.

There. It started out quite well but then descended into drivel. Much like several of my posts. I could write an entire book using this technique. People probably have. Poetry would certainly be a doddle because, of course, poetry doesn’t have to make sense. Indeed, the less sense there is in a piece of poetry, the more deep and meaningful it can be. So let’s try the predictive sentence software on some verse:

You are so cute and fun to play with

I’m so happy to see you in your head

I love my life and my friends are so many

You can do this for a while ago and now I’m going to have a great day

Let me try another. I’m on a roll here…

The world has nothing but the best

And I have no problem with that

And I don’t know what I want to do

But then you say the world has nothing but nothing else

And then there’s nothing that could happen

And the most beautiful thing is the only thing I’ve had

The position of Poet Laureat beckons.

Tags: poetry