Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Geosynchronous

Sifting through some backed-up files from my non-heady college days in search of examples of writerly merit... The occasional oddity turns up among the drafts. I'm probably about as tired right now as I perpetually was at the end of any given semester, so I'm mentally ready to find the following first cut at a poem vaguely funny, as I presume I did when I first wrote it. (If memory serves, I typed it out over a couple of afternoons as a counterpoint to, or substitute for, more pressing end-of-term tasks.) My aesthetic evaluation of it five years later is "undercooked" and "positioned uncomfortably between real-poem and fake-poem status". Anyway, for your optional perusal.

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Geosynchronous

the claw-handed robots
are on our moon
they are waving solemnly
they take a step backwards
to fit in a snapshot with the flag

they can withstand the cold and non-pressure of space
they like the cold and non-pressure of space

we are on the back porch drinking margaritas
your mouth laughs and tastes like salt
you are tucked in my lap like a comma
the robots run their calculations

we built them ourselves you know
the claw-handed robots
we thought they would want to serve in factories

but they didnt
so we sent them away on a spaceship
we thought they were headed for the sun
but they werent
and now theyre pissed off

the robots gather and wait
in geosynchronous orbit
one of them knows how to swivel its head just right
so it looks at us all the time

we didnt give them love or genitals
they dont need them
they have force shields
and those claw-hands
they will kill us with their higher math
how could we be so stupid
we didnt make them alive enough to die

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