Some time ago, I asked LLaMA AI to write an essay on my poem The Perfect End. The result was two distinct texts: one reflective and informal, the other academic in tone. Both took the poem seriously—perhaps more seriously than I expected. It gave me an idea: what if I invited other AIs to join the conversation?
Below is a third essay, written by ChatGPT. It offers yet another perspective—less academic than the second, but perhaps a bit more lyrical in its reading. I’m publishing these not to prove any point, but to see what happens when human ambiguity meets machine interpretation.
You’ll find the original poem here, and the first two AI-generated essays here and here.
The Bench Outside the Cemetery: On Maciej Modzelewski’s “The Perfect End”
In his poem The Perfect End, Maciej Modzelewski imagines a quiet kind of extinction—not grand, not mourned, not mythologized. Just a man, a cottage, a cemetery nearby, and the alphabet ticking softly in the background.
How convenient would it be to live in a cottage
next to a cemetery?
So begins the poem, not with drama, but with dry speculation. There’s something gently heretical about the question. It suggests proximity to death—not as threat, but as a kind of ease. The speaker isn’t interested in death as spectacle. They’re more concerned with the terms of proximity: where to live, what matters, and how to reject the “ghastly conventionalities of days of yore” that so often drape the dead in someone else’s idea of dignity.
Modzelewski’s voice is crisp, unsentimental, and wry. The poem operates like a quiet refusal. Refusal of legacy, of solemn ritual, of meaning carved into stone. Instead, it offers something else: the possibility of existing without spectacle, without performance—even at the threshold of nonexistence.
you should never deny yourself
the simple pleasure of inadequacy…
This is the hinge of the poem, and its most dangerous idea. The simple pleasure of inadequacy is not self-pitying. It’s not defeatist. It’s almost celebratory. It rejects the modern obsession with impact, relevance, legacy. The speaker doesn’t seek greatness. They seek something smaller, softer, maybe even more honest: the comfort of having nothing to prove.
The most haunting image arrives near the end:
just because a bench plaque
would be the only befitting abridgement of your meagre existence
after wandering through life at the speed of the alphabet.
Here, the poem pulls back the curtain on the whole edifice of legacy. What remains? A bench. A plaque. Perhaps a name, unread. The final line—“at the speed of the alphabet”—is as close to a metaphysical shrug as language allows. Life is not a crescendo. It’s a sequence. Letter after letter. Not meaningless, but never monumental.
What Modzelewski achieves in just seven lines is a distilled rejection of our culture’s death-fantasies. No blaze of glory, no tragic climax, no need for the last word. Just a life lived adjacent to endings, quietly, as if to say: even the unremembered have their place.
More words to ponder at maciejmodzelewski.com
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