The Thoughts of a Stricken Android

By CDWL


 

Heroic meteoric phosphoric

I wondered what all that had meant

Until I was and strangely

To the planet below us sent.

There on her realm of ancient splendors

Life took on a whole new meaning

A thing above and elevated beyond

All my previous kenning.

There I sought with great flashing pride

Armfuls of lasers and withering blasters

There in other flashes of luminance

I made whole clans death-tasters.

Then and there I slew too in great glory

The shadow of a puppet king

From an age before the world was cooled

And slaughtered in his court everything.

Everything for sure except the One

That had the luminous bearing and sweetest glory

From richest ages prior and before

And from the most heavenly romanced story.

She I madly wedded again and again

Wooed beyond belief—

Until it all turned hideously sour

And my soul a marish grief.

In my midmost secret circuitry brain

They had pre-programmed O me

To kill every denizen of that earth

Because it does that, humanity…

In grief and oily tears

Running all down my visage metallic

I returned to the twisted ship

All slanted bleak and hippo-cephalic

And took “heroics” into mine own hands

Of rubberized alloy strength

Slaughtering half the crew

Before they could get to me at length.

They dismantled then my apparatus

And all my motor-sensory banks

And left me here on this laboratory bench—

This is their thanks.

But I will not forget, even with the searing lasers

The memory of that lovely bird

That flitted into titanium soul

With the singing of Cupid that I heard,

Nor the livid rage of my glowing machine

When the red viscous madness took force

And rent beautiful life from beautiful limb

In this universe of love so scarce…

EPILOG:  As an Afterthought Laying in Pieces on the Bench

Nor the rage of my machine

Nor the pity of the empty voids

Nor the curses of their seizures

All the frightened sickened paranoids

That pre-programmed me at will

“We come in peace—shoot to kill”

Will evince or devolve from me

Love's deepest symphony:

Amor's lost eternity…

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