In the style of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline funeral duet “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun”, etc. This is for a two-panel comparative work between an old school artist like me, and a work generated by AI using ChatGPT and Midjourney in November, 2025.
ChatGPT generated a poem to spec in 2 seconds. It took me a month to rewrite it twice. EDIT: Final edit happened during the paint job. I had to decide on whether to include an extra 23 beats on the 24 line poem. I pared it down.
Too long to be a proper sonnet, and too, well, distasteful to be repeated – the funeral song in Cymbeline was 10 lines too long to be a sonnet, a duet…for a funeral – and the fabliaux it imitated was absolutely puerile dreck, soft porn narratives passed around in private clubs. Stories were created and compiled to offer the reader a trove of shocking adulterous behavior. I dove deeper. Shakespeare likely wrote this play for the Blackfriar’s Theatre in “The King’s Men” theatre group, an indoor high dollar snootium where he worked as an actor. I think he worked as an actor the same reason Bill Murray did guerilla service labor, sheer curiosity. The theatre would have had “special effects” involving rigging, pyrotechnics, gantries and expensive props and played to a higher paying crowd. Avant-gaurd for the haute couture.
The play features a deaux ex machina in the form of Jupiter saving someone for no good reason, probably.
Fabliaux was trash written for rich people who could read. Shakespeare would have had access to a publisher nearby who put out titles like “Westward for Smelts: OR, The VVater-mans Fare of mad-merry VVestern wenches, whose tongues albeit like Bell-clappers, they neuer leaue Ringing, yet their Tales are sweet, and will much content you.” LOL. I read about some wenches. Spicy and funny! Those people partied! LONDON, Printed for Iohn Trundle, and are to be sold at his shop in Barbican, at the Signe of the No-body. 1620 . The mascot has pants to the chin, so it literally has no body, just limbs and a head. https://ota.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repository/xmlui/bitstream/handle/20.500.12024/A14984/A14984.html?sequence=5
That’s the text.
So, this John Trumble, was he a serious man? The same year, Trundle set up his own printing business in the Barbican. His shop was “at the Sign of Nobody”. It seemed he ran it as a tavern as well. Going by a 17th century That’s the text. rint, the sign was a man in breeches which came up to his neck, his arms sticking out of the pockets, and a cap covering his face. https://www.barbicanliving.co.uk/blocks/john-trundle-court/john-trundle-1575-1629/ No. Awesome. Let’s go deeper. If you find the connection tenuous, then you need the fibre of consensus, indeed, and whatnot.
He wrote pulp. Serials were hugely popular, things with parables, predictions, fictions and stories of convictions or heinous deeds ongoing. Sensational stuff for the reading public.
So, this stuff was meant to be camp, outrageous. I have a painting accompanying this work – two, actually – but they are still in the works.
The washer dies, but not for thee
In grey and puce and mauve seances,
An NPC, mere scenery.
A drum, a moon, brown noise entrances
Sepulchral, soft, oh silent tomb.
For two good years our fruit of looms
It took despite the load. If lids
Choose locks whose spells we could not guess.
For years - but two - swirled shorts with skids.
Just like our lives, troubles egress.
The basement carries the gurgle of sewage,
No more, but poorer for the knowledge.
I break small bills in a laundromat;
The chips get stuck in the snack machine.
One wash, one load, one world, know that
A rug in the drum, it danced, verily.
A clattering clamor - one could cry.
If it's not fixe, I pay, cards slide
So ask, what is a dryer alone?
A maw, a woe without a moan.
To weave in traps cat claws, unsewn
Unseen, lint to steam softens tone.
A van, a dolly, a grunt, a groan;
Old one out, new one home.
Fifty State Banana 