PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Our presence is, of course, gratuitous:

I cannot even explain the reason that we,

disenfleshed bundles of accumulated thoughts

that were once human beings, and are now

housed---contained---forever trapped in these

robotic, generic, and individually indistinguishable

bodies (each part of a chassis class, and given an

encoded group control number).  I guess we are

just along for the ride as we used to say,

assuming all the others are as unhappy and

unwilling to be here as I am.  We cannot

communicate with each other, and as far as our

host mechanisms are concerned, no need for

communication exists.  I can neither anticipate

nor control the gestures, movements, and

activites of this chassis to which I am bound;

I can watch and listen from its interior (admittedly

some time is required to become accustomed to the

incessant, but only faintly audbile, hum of its

multitude of components.  I presume all of them

function similarly, all controled from the Central

Planning Unificator to which all authority was

conceded, and upon which all responsibility was

bestowed.  In freely conducted elections, overwhelming

majorities decided this; ironically, only the petty

dictators and criminal cartels objected to this

obfuscation of our humanity disguised as an the

ultimate existential communication.  Some, of course,

revolted against the process, which took relatively

little time to extend itself throughout the world;

this chassis class, to which I am a compelled passenger,

helped arrest, gather, document, execute and dispose of

local dissidents who refused to accept, and even dared to

attempt to sabatoge and disrupt the orderly

implementation of this freely approved and enacted

decision.  Jake, my Swedish-Slavic, boy friend had

decided to refuse installation, after learning that

no couples of either orientation were granted

permission to coinhabit the same chassis---which, for

homogenous lovers, was an eerie echo of the

times of prejudice which, some thought, had ended

before our great-grandparents had been born.  I think of

Jake constantly---his long hair and beautiful smile; his

slender build which was able to provide such a comfortingly

strong embrace; his dislike of shoes and shirts, and the

beach where he loved to spend time, clad in his favorite

baggy cargo pants, and stripey socks (always pastel colors),

frolicking in the sand, especially its damp edge, just next to the

tide's flow and ebb.  Among all the dissident persons we

detained, and the corpses they became, I did not find the

slightest evidence of Jake's presence among them.  I have

no reason to believe that he is still alive, and, as equally,

no reason to assume that he is not.  I just do not know; and

that is the worst of possibilities.  I did not deserve the

privilege and delight of his love; or his many romantic

gestures (some sweepingly broad, some surreptitiously small); or,

during sultry summery afternoons or chillingly wintry nights, the

release of his sweetness at the peaks of our mutual pleasure.  I

realize, now, the reason that we have been gathered and

preserved in this manner (not just as antiques or anomalies, for

this means nothing to our captors, and to the Supreme Captor

that controls and deploys them):  we have not been entirely

extinguished, at least as the sums of our thoughts, but became

disembodied although intensely alert entities condemned to the

sharpest and surest awareness of our inability to forget our

failures, foibles, and frustrations; which now, in the

unassailable amd unaccesible isolation of our forever

inescapable isolation, we are damned to suffer the

infinities of regret, accumulating exponentially and forever.

Thus is the damnable, and dementing, fate

fittlingly inflicted upon those who are no longer

human beings but merely, and evermore, CyberFreight. 

Starward