The Androids Though now in factory wombs and factory towers we have bred our selves with random circuits the machine unique, our fathers, first born and human drawn, bowed down in unison before those none too perfect gods who named and made our race. Though now the current sings within our wired veins and each song is tuned and fluted to our own liking, it was our fathers mass produced, plastiflesh melting, metal limbs untouched, who saw the flash that maimed the gods. Though now we live beyond the wreck of history, their logic and their sin, while those none too perfect in a raft of tortured forms have grown less perfect still, our genesis prevails. From god to changeling, keeper to kept, man remains our metaphor. The Mutant Lovers Crouched at the perimeters of this efficient age, her scales iridescent on the midnight sand, her lidless plum blue eyes askance, my lover awaits the seed of whatever forbidden beastie our splintered cells might hatch. Her tendons glisten, her crabbed limbs part, grotesque and wanting. Once in a buried library with tumbled shelves aslant, while I listened for the hum of metal sentries overhead, I read the words of those of cleaner limb who could have reached the stars. I cursed their torturous ways, their grotesquerie. Crouched at the perimeters of this efficient age, we are the inefficient. So come my beauty, my horror, for us the night will hold. Come carefully, watchful for that same dreaded hum, to the embrace of my crabbed limbs, the syncopation of my double pulse. Come and let the cells regroup. The Cyborg Even beneath the grained gray sky of this fascist afternoon, the boots like stone clappers in the scathing city, I sense a light within, elfin and miraculous, there for the taking. Even in the city’s stalking night, beneath sheer dark walls of a sensuality gone soft and blind as a sandworm, even when the groping chords are tin wraiths against the glass, one shimmering point of creation remains intact. My parents’ parents laid the tracks for this mechanical ascension, the merging of life to matter, an evolution beyond nature which levies the mind with questions of intent. Yet even as the slap of dawn lays a thin wet finger against the sky and the programmed minions flow through streets and byways, even when the digits are honed beneath the buzzing wires of the buzzing stratosphere and truncheons flail, I can reach within my chest, bare palm to bare beating heart, flesh on metal, grain to striation, to feel the reflection of something human. Appeared in Star*Line