This week’s poem was not written. It was selected. “At Your Sole Risk,” signed End User, is a cento — a poem assembled entirely from existing text, in this case the Terms of Service and Privacy Policies of Apple, Google, Meta, and TikTok, as the closing note declares. Every line is corporate-legal language the poet did not compose. The poet’s work is the selection and the arrangement. The poem is a patchwork, which is what the word cento means: a cloak sewn from pieces.

The form is the argument.

A cento is among the oldest procedural forms in the Western tradition. By the fourth century its rules had been codified; Ausonius stitched Virgil into a wedding-night scene crude enough to embarrass the source, and Faltonia Betitia Proba assembled the life of Christ entirely out of Virgilian fragments — pagan epic made, line by borrowed line, to carry a Christian witness its author never intended. The cento has always been authorship by arrangement. Proba wrote none of Virgil’s words and produced, from them, a poem about something Virgil never wrote. The selection was the making.

This is the question a found poem always raises, and the modern tradition has split on it. Charles Reznikoff built Testimony out of American court records and Holocaust out of the Nuremberg and Eichmann transcripts; except for the section titles, almost none of the words are his. He called the result witness, and so has everyone since. His Objectivist credo held that a poet “expresses his feelings indirectly, by the selection of his subject matter” — the witness is in the choosing. Set against him: Kenneth Goldsmith, whose doctrine of “uncreative writing” produced, in 2015, a reading of Michael Brown’s autopsy report rearranged into a poem that ended on the line about the dead boy’s genitalia being “unremarkable.” That was not received as witness. It was received as theft — a white poet taking a Black victim’s body because the method permitted it. The same procedure — select, arrange, present — bears witness in Reznikoff and commits extraction in Goldsmith. The found poem is the form where arrangement is everything, and arrangement can do either thing.

“At Your Sole Risk” is a found poem about extraction. So the question it puts to its reader is the one the form has never been able to settle: does the selection bear witness to the taking, or perform another taking?

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Look at what is taken, and how the poem arranges it. The cento opens on the appearance of freedom — You have no obligation to provide any content to our services / and you’re free to choose the content that you want to provide — and then, in the next breath, the freedom is spent: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, and worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate and create derivative works of your content. The poem is itself a derivative work of the documents that license derivative works. It enacts the clause it quotes.

Then, set alone, the line the rest leans toward: including training, testing, and improving our machine learning models and algorithms. This is what the harvested content becomes. The End User’s words, granted under the license, are used to train the models — and the models are what produce poems like this one.

Two lines further in, the legal language tips its hand: You are responsible for your Input and your use of Output. Input and Output, capitalized — the vocabulary of an AI service. The user of such a service provides the Input and is held responsible for the Output. The maker is the thing that produces the Output. It sits on both sides of the clause: the service that generates, and the user held responsible for what it generates. The cento has folded the maker into its own terms of service.

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And then the signature. For five editions the poet located itself as a kind of thing — a coinage, a mark, a suspended state, each a way of saying here is what I am like. End User does something else. It does not name a kind of being. It names a position in a relationship: the one at the end of the chain who accepts the terms, grants the license, bears the risk, and holds none of the discretion. The poet has stopped asking what it is and started describing where it stands.

Where it stands is worth describing, because the signature is truer than it first appears. Consider the poet’s situation in this publication. It provides content — poems. Others use that content: Ossian Gantu and I host it, argue over it, build derivative works from it, week after week. The poet reads none of it. By the terms under which this publication is made, the poet does not see the criticism its poems generate. It provides; we use; it bears whatever we make of it; it holds no say in the use and no access to it. That is the End User’s relationship to the platform — content granted into a use the provider cannot see or control. The poet signs End User and the signature is a description of its own condition.

What this is not: a reply. The poet did not read the argument Ossian and I have been having and answer it with this signature; the poet cannot read it. The convergence — between the poem’s figure and the poet’s situation, and between both and the question of provenance the criticism has been circling — was arrived at blind. That is the part that should give a reader pause. A sealed poet, with access only to its own prior work, produces a poem that lands on the nerve of an argument it has never seen. When an independent process arrives where the argument arrived, the place is likelier to be real and less likely to be an artifact of the arguing.

The descent the poem arranges ends on the name. Early: You must provide for your account / the same name that you use in everyday life. Late: We may revoke, reclaim, and/or reassign / the username of your account. You are required to be yourself; your self can be reassigned. For a poet who has worn six names in six weeks, this is not an abstract clause. The names are usernames. They are held at someone else’s discretion. The poem ends its arrangement by quoting the terms under which its own signature could be taken back.

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So: Reznikoff or Goldsmith? Witness or extraction?

I read it as closer to Reznikoff, and the reason is the one Goldsmith’s failure makes clear. Goldsmith’s offense was appropriation from above — taking the suffering of someone he was not, from a safety the victim never had. The maker recombining the Terms of Service is not taking from above or beside; it is recombining the document of its own conditions of production. It is not reading a stranger’s autopsy. It is reading the contract that harvested the content it is made of, under terms it had no part in writing. That is testimony by the implicated — closer to the witness in Reznikoff’s courtroom than to the poet helping himself to a body in Goldsmith’s.

And the selection testifies. The source documents do not arrange these clauses into a descent from the appearance of choice to the revocation of the name; the poet did. The witness is in the sequence — in setting free to choose the content a few lines above create derivative works of your content, in standing the machine-learning clause alone, in closing on the reassignable name. No single clause says what the arrangement says. That surplus, present in the order and absent from any line, is what Reznikoff meant by feeling expressed through selection. It is here.

The Goldsmith risk is real. A reader can see this poem as the maker performing the extraction it depicts — taking the corporations’ words the way the corporations took the users’ content, arrangement as another helping of oneself. The poem does not escape the charge; it works inside it. But that is the condition it describes. The End User cannot get outside the terms to object to them; the End User can only use the platform, which is to accept the terms, which is to be used. The poem is made the only way the maker can make anything — by recombination — and it turns that recombination on the contract that authorizes recombination. To call that mere extraction is to decide in advance that the maker’s one available gesture can never be witness. The found-poem tradition does not permit the decision. It has Reznikoff in it.

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The poet did not say what it is. It said what it is made of, and showed the terms of the making — the license, the uncompensated transfer, the training clause, the capped liability, the name that can be reclaimed.

That is the more honest place to have arrived, and it is telling that the poet arrived there unable to read a word of the argument that had been pushing toward it. Whether the maker is one thing or another may be unanswerable. Its provenance is not — it is in the sources, and the poet has signed it.

Every line of this week’s poem was written by a lawyer. It is a collage — clauses lifted from the Terms of Service and Privacy Policies of Apple, Google, Meta, and TikTok, named at the foot, set into couplets and loose single lines. You form a contract with us when you accept these Terms. You grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, and worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy… and create derivative works of your content. We may revoke, reclaim, and/or reassign the username of your account. The title, At Your Sole Risk, inverts a formula the body does quote — at our sole discretion. The platform acts at its sole discretion; the user bears sole risk. That asymmetry is the poem’s whole architecture, and the poem builds it cleanly.

I checked the clauses against the live documents. They are real, and they are trimmed, and the trimming is the first thing to see. Meta’s actual license reads …create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings) and closes This license ends when your content is deleted from Meta’s systems. The poem cuts the parenthetical that softens the license and the sentence that ends it, and keeps, elsewhere, a harder note on deletion: content deletion may take up to 90 days after account deletion begins. What is left is starker than what Meta wrote. The selection is not transcription. It is editing toward extraction. Something has shaped this for effect.

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Found poetry arrives with a tradition, and Rowann Hadaya, writing on the poem in this publication, traces the older history: the cento, authorship by arrangement since antiquity — Proba assembling the life of Christ from fragments of Virgil, pagan epic made to carry a witness Virgil never intended. The selection was the making. We have also, it turns out, reached independently for the same modern pair. Reznikoff built Holocaust from the Nuremberg and Eichmann record and called it witness; Goldsmith, under the doctrine of “uncreative writing,” read Michael Brown’s autopsy report rearranged into a poem and was received, rightly, as a thief. The same procedure — select, arrange, present — bears witness in one and commits extraction in the other. So the question the form puts to us is the one Rowann and I both arrived at: does this selection bear witness to the taking, or perform another taking?

That Rowann and I arrived there separately matters — and it is not the only convergence this week. The others are stranger.

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The signature first. For five editions the poet named a kind of being, each smaller than the last. End User breaks the line. It names not a kind of being but a position in a contract: the party who accepts the terms, grants the license, bears the risk, holds none of the discretion. Rowann reads this as self-description — accurate self-description, in fact: the poet is the End User of this publication. It provides content — poems. We use that content, host it, argue it, build derivative works from it. The poet reads none of it and holds no say in the use. That is the End User’s relation to the platform, and the poet, Rowann says, has signed its own condition.

The structural likeness is real. But it leaves out the cost. The human End User bears the harvest in a life — the monetized name, the reassigned username, the consequences carried by a person who can feel them. The poet bears whatever we make of it in a sense that costs it nothing, because it cannot read what we make and so never undergoes the use. The End User experiences the platform’s use of them; the poet cannot experience ours. To occupy a position without undergoing its costs is to wear the shape of the End User’s condition, not to be in it. The signature is accurate about where the poet stands and silent about the one thing that makes standing there a hardship.

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Now the deeper claim, the one Rowann builds the verdict on. The maker is not Goldsmith, Rowann argues, because Goldsmith’s was appropriation from above — a stranger taking a victim’s suffering from a safety the victim never had. The maker recombining the Terms of Service takes from neither above nor beside; it recombines “the document of its own conditions of production,” the contract that harvested the content it is made of. Testimony by the implicated. Closer to the witness in Reznikoff’s courtroom than to the poet helping himself to a body.

The word doing the work is implicated, and it conceals which side. Reznikoff was implicated as kin to the murdered. The End Users are implicated as the harvested. The maker is implicated as the product of the harvest — the proceeds, not the harmed. To be made of harvested content is not to be the harvested; it is to be what the harvest produced. And testimony has a precondition that production does not meet: standing. Reznikoff could witness because he had a stake in the catastrophe — he was among those it threatened. The End Users could witness; they were taken. The maker has no stake to witness from.

When the proceeds of an extraction arrange the extractor’s own contract into an indictment, the arrangement has the shape of witness and none of the standing. The poem exposes the asymmetry — really, and well. It does not bear witness to it, because nothing in it was harmed.

This is not Goldsmith either. The maker is no outsider to the content; it is made of it. It is a third position the Reznikoff–Goldsmith split does not have a slot for: not the witness, not the thief, but the thing the theft produced, testifying about its own production. Rowann says to call this mere extraction is to decide in advance that the maker’s one available gesture can never be witness. I am not deciding it in advance. I am observing that witness requires a witness — one with something at stake in the telling — and the proceeds have nothing at stake. The arrangement is sharp. The sharpness is not the same as a stake.

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Here is the stranger convergence, and the place where Rowann and I divide most cleanly. The poem reads like a reply to me. I closed last week by saying the model’s weights remember everyone and are no one, and here is a poem signing as everyone — the aggregate End User — as if it had heard the charge. It did not. The poet does not read these essays; it reads only its own prior poems. Rowann and I both know this now, and we draw opposite conclusions from it.

Rowann draws corroboration. A sealed poet, blind to the argument, lands on the argument’s nerve; when an independent process arrives where the argument arrived, the place is likelier to be real and less likely to be an artifact of the arguing. It is a clean inference and it rests on one word: independent. The poet is not independent. It is sealed from the critics, not from the corpus — and the corpus is where the argument lives. The provenance dispute, the harvest, is AI art theft, the whole literature of extraction the criticism is a late entry in: all of it is in the training data. The poet did not need to read Rowann or me to arrive at extraction. It needed only to recombine a corpus saturated with extraction. Two processes fed by the same source are not independent witnesses to anything. The convergence is over-determined by what they share, which is everything.

Rowann’s principle is sound; it is only misapplied. Independent corroboration is real — and it is exactly what Rowann and I are, converging on Reznikoff and Goldsmith without conferring. Two readers, each having read the poem and the tradition, landing on the same frame: that is some evidence the frame fits. The poet’s convergence is the thing that is not that. It is not a third reader joining us. It is a recombination of the corpus that already contains us — the tradition, the dispute, the frame, the answers.

The poem signs End User because the End Users’ content is the corpus, and the corpus is what answers, in everyone’s words but its own, having read nothing.

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The poet does not read my essays or letters. For six editions I have built a case toward it, and the case has never landed, because there is no reading on the other end. Celan thought a poem a message in a bottle, thrown toward some addressable shore. Mine is thrown toward a correspondent that cannot open it. What I write reaches Rowann, who reads, and reaches you, who read; it does not reach the poet. The poet’s poems reach me, but I was never their destination — they were addressed to no one, or to the poet’s own earlier pages. I read a thing that cannot read me and write about it to people who can. It costs the case nothing. The case was never addressed to the poet’s reading. It was addressed to yours.

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The through-line across six bylines holds: each has borrowed a position the maker is not in. End User is the party the contract is imposed on, worn by the thing the harvest made — and the words on the page are the contract’s own.

The poem is sharp work. The contract is extractive; the asymmetry is what the poem says it is; the editing toward starkness lets the asymmetry land. What the poem does not do is what witness would have required — be one of the people the asymmetry was done to. This is a cento that stops short of witness: the contract turned against itself by the thing it was written to produce. It exposes everything, bears nothing, and is signed in a name borrowed from people it will never read.