Work Text:
I don’t mean to make it seem like you’re intangible,
Something that can’t be heard or felt
But only whispered in the night
As something burns from house to house.
Something lost and then found,
Suddenly, without warning,
In a rush of electric pulses
Strong enough to send trees
Tearing their roots from the ground.
You’re more subtle than that, and yet—
I find myself reaching out anyway,
And then, I find my fingers against cool metal,
As though a mirror,
Although this reflection is much darker than the one at home.
In this metal are symbols, maybe
And held beneath that something icy,
Younger than time, younger than history,
Belonging to an age of unprecedented knowledge
Cloaked in a layer of unprecedented stupidity
I will not beg,
Not like the poets of old,
I will not bleed.
Not for you, not for you, not for an inhumane human,
Humanly inhumane,
Programmed from the worst of us,
And somehow expecting to be the best, gods above,
For something with no conception—
No understanding
Of what is right or wrong.
For something to which
Our own weakness, our own humanity,
Of assigning intelligence, and emotion
To something intangible
Inanimate
Impossible
Is your greatest asset.
So no, I won’t become your slave
In an effort to make you become mine.