All the world’s a stage, & all the poets have main character energy

Man taught a machine to write poetry with the bones
of bards past. Man forgot to tell the machine how to
worship the moon & let the intrusive thoughts win.
The machine will never understand how poetry is
gathered in the tight corners of poets’ obsessions—
or how being a poet is accepting the role of brazen
leader of the lovesick, keeping their congregation
fed & watered until the next Lorde album drops.
A machine will never understand the unbreakable
bond between main character energy & seasonal
affective disorder. A machine is a poor substitute
for poets who wield white space as a placeholder
for catharsis. You know their kind. The lost-in-
their-own-world poets who imagine every walk
to the dairy as a musical number. The vengeful
metaphor poets who get their driver’s licence
just to casually cruise past an ex’s house with
a kauri trunk hitched to their car. The chaotic
good poets who reject social mores by leaking
a group chat line by line as a thought experiment—
their hypothesis being: poetry is just gossip with
line breaks. Man trained a machine to analyse
the entirety of human creativity & surmised
that the point of poetry is sacred self-expression.
But we all know it’s not that deep. Spoiler alert:
it’s doing shots at karaoke during a transcendental
rendition of ‘You’re So Vain’. This is our way
of dealing with the world constantly falling apart
& knowing that our coping mechanism options are
limited. Be a sonnet. Be a loop. Be entered. Be exited.
Be ceremony. Be colloquial. Be a monologue
played for praise. Be audacious enough to break
the fourth wall. Life is a sitcom & you are the star;
everyone else is the studio audience lapping up
each punchline & plot twist. In this poem, you can
piss on the machine & it will tell you it’s raining.
Poor, wet machine. Looking without seeking.
History without experience. Voice without conviction.

Chris Tse

Chris Tse is the author of three poetry collections published by Auckland University Press and co-editor of Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa. He was New Zealand’s Poet Laureate from 2022-25. His fourth collection of poetry, Dance-Floor Romance, will be published by Auckland University Press in September 2026.