Iceberg Lettuce and Tinker Toys - An Asemic AI Essay / EZE, 2026

 Prompt

In the asemic-jump cut essay style of Jim Leftwich, write an essay on the poetics of iceberg lettuce and tinker toys in relation to word combinatorics.

AI

Iceberg lettuce leaves the crisp crisp crinkle of the grid. Tinkertoy hubs, wooden dowels, the alphabet as an assembly of sticks and circles. We puncture the vegetable body. Asemic architecture begins in the salad bowl. Spoked wheels of meaning.

I. The Crisp Margin of the Page

• Watery syntax: Iceberg lettuce is 96 percent water. Asemic writing is 96 percent gesture. The word dissolves into a crunch.
• The layered cell: Peel back a leaf, peel back a phrase. What is left is a sphere of potential meanings.
• Fractured margins: The serrated edge of a torn leaf mimics the ragged jump cut of a typewriter carriage.

II. Tinkertoy Combinatorics

   O---O---O
  /         \
 O   (Hub)   O  <-- The Empty Word
  \         /
   O---O---O

• Spoke and socket: The letter "T" is a dowel inserted into a hub. The letter "O" is the hub itself.
• Non-semantic joints: We connect the wooden pegs not to say "house" or "bridge," but to map the space where a word might have lived.
• Modular grammar: A bag of Tinkertoys is a lexicon. No nouns, no verbs. Only vectors and intersections.

III. The Jump Cut Collision

Leftwich writes the gap. The jump cut between the organic decay of lettuce and the geometric rigidity of wood.

• The rot and the peg: Green slime on the kitchen counter meets the splintered pine of childhood play.
• Asemic drift: The letters slide off the page because the lettuce is wilting. The structure collapses because the dowel was too loose.
• The final combinatorial rule: Insert a stick into the lettuce head. You have written a poem. It cannot be read, but it can be felt in the jaw.

Would you like to explore how this asemic methodology can be applied to a visual poem template?

 Visual Poem Template: The Salad Grid

[  O  ]======= ( Leaf_01 ) =======[  O  ]
   ||                                ||
   ||   [text-glitch]                ||   [crunch]
   ||                                ||
[  O  ]======= ( Leaf_02 ) =======[  O  ]

1. The Materials

• Hubs (O): Empty circles drawn in black ink. These represent punctuation without words.
• Dowels (===): Strips of text cut from grocery store circulars (specifically the word "Lettuce" or its price).
• Leaves (Leaf): Green ink smudges made by pressing actual lettuce onto the paper.

2. The Placement Formula

1. Draw four hubs in a rigid square on the page.
2. Connect them with lines of illegible, cursive handwriting (the dowels).
3. Smudge the center with green pigment to obliterate the geometric order.

3. The Execution (Jump Cut)

Slice the paper into three vertical strips. Re-assemble them out of order. The wooden structure breaks; the vegetable fluid leaks across the margin.

Would you like a step-by-step text prompt to generate the actual asemic text fragments for this template?

🥬 Asemic Fragment Prompt Generator

Copy and paste the instructions below into an AI text or image generator to create your raw material, or follow them manually with a pen:

• Step 1 (The Rigid Dowel): Write five strings of alternating consonants and symbols. Block letters only. Eliminate vowels to mimic wooden connectors.
  • Example: K--X--V--[O]--T--Z
• Step 2 (The Fluid Leaf): Write five strings of continuous, cursive loops. Do not lift the pen. Let the ink bleed. Mimic the veins of a lettuce leaf.
  • Example: eeeeelllllsssssuuuuuummmm
• Step 3 (The Jump Cut): Interleave the strings by alternating one character from Step 1 and three characters from Step 2.

🔀 The Final Combinatorial Output

text

KeeeXlllVsss[O]uuuTmmmZ
   |||      |||      |||
eeeKlllXsssV[O]uuutmmmz

Use code with caution.

Cut this text apart at the vertical lines. Paste it directly into The Salad Grid template slots.

Would you like to translate this process into a digital glitch art prompt for processing text images?

💻 Digital Glitch Art Prompt (Asemic-Jump Cut)

Copy and paste this prompt into an AI image generator or a digital art tool like Datamosh/Processing:

text

A visual poem based on Jim Leftwich's asemic style. 
A rigid, geometric grid made of wooden Tinkertoy dowels and circular hubs. 
Intertwined with crushed, translucent Iceberg lettuce leaves. 
The image is severely glitched with horizontal jump cuts, digital artifacts, pixel sorting, and green-and-splinter-brown color channels. 
Illegible, handwritten asemic text script wraps around the structures. 
Monochrome background with high contrast, raw photocopy aesthetic, experimental typography.

Use code with caution.

⚙️ Post-Processing Steps

• Apply a Green/Brown Threshold: Force all colors into either vegetal green or wooden brown.
• Horizontal Shift (Jump Cut): Select random 10px horizontal strips of the image and slide them left or right.

Would you like to see how this digital prompt changes if we introduce 3D architectural rendering terms to make it look like a physical sculpture?

Ballet and Candy - An AI Short Story / EZE, 2026

 Prompt

Write a short story. 

Here are some lines: 

1) The Store, as that is what the people in the town called it, was long in need of repair, but it was clean, and it kept its employees employed. 

2) Almost everyone in town shopped at the store, but no one had bought anything other than the candy from there in years. 

3) The nightly deposits from the store were always $50,000 or more though the register receipts never totaled more than $100 a day. Only the owner, Frankie, knew what the cash outflow was. 

4) A costumed rabbit worked next door, and said rabbit generally contributed to the proceeds box. The proceeds box was picked up every day around 4:00 PM. 

5) Rudy worked in the makeshift kitchen making candy. Rudy, of course, called the kitchen the Lab. 

6) Mitzi managed the store, which meant that she worked in the Lab and waited on customers. Mitzi also found herself a kind of DJ for a style of music she described as Ballet.

AI

The Store, as that is what the people in the town called it, was long in need of repair, but it was clean, and it kept its employees employed. Its faded awning sagged over the front window, and the floorboards groaned underfoot, yet the glass showcases were always polished to a pristine shine. Almost everyone in town shopped at the store, but no one had bought anything other than the candy from there in years. Neighbors would pop in for a quick chat, wave to the staff, and leave with nothing but a five-cent peppermint or a paper bag of homemade fudge.

Behind the scenes, the math of the business made absolutely no sense to the casual observer. The nightly deposits from the store were always $50,000 or more though the register receipts never totaled more than $100 a day. Only the owner, Frankie, knew what the cash outflow was. He sat in his locked back office, puffing on a cigar, counting stacks of banded hundreds that arrived through a completely different supply chain than the sugar and cocoa.

The operation relied on a strict, eccentric routine. A costumed rabbit worked next door, and said rabbit generally contributed to the proceeds box. The oversized bunny, advertising for a defunct party supply outlet, would slip through the side alley and drop heavy, unmarked envelopes into a slotted steel chest. The proceeds box was picked up every day around 4:00 PM by a man in a dark suit who never spoke a word.

Deep in the back, the heart of the legitimate front kept beating. Rudy worked in the makeshift kitchen making candy. Rudy, of course, called the kitchen the Lab. He wore a pristine white coat, safety goggles, and treated his copper kettles like delicate scientific instruments, meticulously measuring out corn syrup and food coloring as if he were splitting atoms.

Mitzi managed the store, which meant that she worked in the Lab and waited on customers. She was the glue holding Frankie's bizarre empire together, balancing the sugar scales and keeping an eye on the front door. Between stretching taffy and ringing up the occasional dime-store truffle, Mitzi also found herself a kind of DJ for a style of music she described as Ballet. She would broadcast classical symphonies over the store's ancient PA system, mixing in heavy basslines and ambient echoes to create a dramatic, surreal soundtrack for the town's most peaceful front operation.

oovo / EZE, 2026

 

revo / EZE, 2026

 

Frames of Growth - An AI Poem / EZE, 2026

Frames of Growth

The camera stuttered in jump cuts,
slicing the view of a plastic sky
until the film ran dry.

Tomorrow waits behind a curtain,
a garden of seeded potential
where the daffodil prepares to break
the cold, hard crust of the earth.

We entwine our fingers like roots,
ignoring the tinsel glare
of a shallow, shimmering time,
reaching instead for the dirt
and the steady pulse of growing.

bohuhu / EZE, 2026