Tuesday 23 June 2015

All That Glitters...

This piece is my favourite to date. With a little inspiration from Thomas Hardy and Richard Brautigan (you know how much I love him!), I have created my own sci-fi poem. 

The key theme: REFLECTION. 

We sometimes forget how simple we are, and at the same time; how complex. We don't always take responsibility for our own actions and I have attempted to utilise poetry to portray this.



All that glitters.
All that glitters is not gold,
The cliché of straw that broke Iron Man’s back;
The meaning of life as we know it.
No amount of machinery can change this concept,
No lump of cold, metal mass that
Despite its hard angles and razor-sharp edges,
Always runs smoothly;
An electrical flow that resembles a heady liquor,
Poured over neat cubed ice,
Directly into the mains,
Blowing up our generation.

Tobor came to life,
A tale not dissimilar to Shelley’s.
Slow, rigid raise of the arm,
Chunky metal clanking noises surround us;
Shackles dragging across the lab floor,
The representation of our world as we know it;
Desire for achievement,
Lust for adventure,
Passion for creation;
Falls to the ground,
Lays in a crumpled heap of atomic energy
Held together with chunky bolts.
Gloopy metallic glue
Trickles from its steel limbs.

It’s alive!
We are dead
(or at least, I hope we are!)
And our blood dribbles into pools
On this liquid-resistant ground.
Tobor and other robotic monsters of the world
Unite to break the peace that man always dreamed of achieving,
Yet somehow never accomplished.
If the serenity of the human race were never there,
Should we question its existence?

A decomposing generation,
Consumed by worms,
But its ok (I think);
I have never known a robot
With a sense of smell.
The heartless beasts of productivity
Will step over us in our earthy burial;
The mud will not cling to their stainless steel soles,
But will always cling to ours.

Once we’re squished into gammy piles of human jam,
Trodden into the once-fertile ground,
We’ll make room for nostalgia,
For our memories;
The credentials of the humankind.
I wonder if Earth’s temperature will plummet,
And they’ll exist in an arctic land,
For they shall not appreciate a cool ice-tea
In the summer heat of their back gardens.
Instead (one can only imagine)
That they will live amongst man-made materials,
Ones built to avoid destruction.
The irony is palpable to us
(Even though we’ll be dead!)
Yet is so indistinguishable to them,
Who’s emotions run no deeper than
A shallow puddle of oil that we created
To maintain their controlled existence
And fluidity of their movement.

The bottom line of it all;
Man created destruction.
The imbalance of the beautiful,
Unforgivably witty oxymoron
Can only define us now we have ceased.
We can only wonder whether
Robots were programmed to engrave our headstones
And allow that line to mock the death of our Race-
(That’s assuming they would ever even give us that respect!).
Man could claim that they owe us everything,
Yet failed to remind them of this
When he fixed their wiring to ‘control-self’.

Is it embarrassing
That we’ve so gladly handed our lives
Over to a hand colder than ice?
Should we be ashamed
That the £60,000 car we designed
Ends the lives of thousands of people every year?
Consideration for mankind,
Lost in an Apple Mac’s programming-
Our souls already sold to social media.
Of course,
Robots have not yet taken over the world as we know it,
Physically.
Expecting to witness demonic monsters
Patrolling the streets late at night;
The stereotype drilled into us
(drilled- the irony!)
Yet this has not yet been achieved.
Our eyes are not able to observe such horrors,
The irony is so blatant!
Absorbed in ourselves too much to consider
Our own reflections;
Beneath our soft skin and bio-degradable shells
Lie the monsters that we so fear.
Man is robot.
We are ultimately
The beasts that will terminate us.


No comments:

Post a Comment