"Dreams of The Mechanical Man" - 未名交友--(www.jiaoyou8.com)

Dreams of the Mechanical Man

Do you know
Of Weatherspring Mill?

That foul mill,
That denigrated hive,
Behind the diseased edifice,
The lampblack centuries?
Buzzing with automated activity
Bolts and brackets and belching black smoke
Fresh from the furnace into the bath
The bath, the quenching bath,
Which squeals and panics and throws billowing steam
Parts meet parts
Amidst showering sparks
As the welders blast joints
And the odious,
Dripping,
Vapor coating.
All those poisons seeping
Down drains where sagging
Knots of toxic effluvium pour from the outspout,
Infecting the groundwater.
Dead trees rest the stunted crows
They wait, their cracked cawing grinds
Like the gnashing of teeth
Their vacant eyes study
A parched and weary and broken little girl
As she, in desperation,
Drinks the black pitch from the lake.

Do you know the workers at Weatherspring Mill?
A creaking mass
A hooded procession
Born into soot nightmares
They are marching in a narrow hallway
A door at either end
Built for workers bent
Over conveyor belts
Jostling belts
While the relentless pounding of the second hand
Echoes
Louder than any machine in the deafening mill.

Some say,
They were human once.
No longer, thank God.

Do you know the mechanical man?
The mechanical man who works the lathe
The lathe in the Weatherspring Mill?
He does not even know what is made at the mill.
Is anything made at the mill?

Of course, he's never left the mill
The rumors of workers who've escaped the mill
The rumors swirl
Like sulfurous eddies in the Weatherspring Lake.

There is rust in the blood
And blood in the rust
The cancer the red red pieces
From the drowsing mechanical man
The golden-dreaming Mechanical Man.

Clank, whirr, clank, whirr
Clank, whirr, clank, whirr
Kajunk Kajunk Kajunk
Clank, whirr, clank, whirr

Mechanical man dreams, he dreams of a girl:
She has no rust, no coils, no cogs
A sunshine girl on summer hills of clover.
Her upturned face, soft and mischevious
With loving eyes
Framed by dark hair sweeping her breasts
Her soft breasts tucked neatly in a white shirt
Riding a little above the hem of her
Blue
Skirt;
Her light blue skirt, from which
Her ankles and bare pink feet
Dance softly over clover.
Petals float from a cherry tree
The girl hangs the linens on the line
Where a snail crawls, unnoticed.
And the linens
The linens are sheets that swell like a sail
As she reaches to affix another plain wooden clothespin
To the unruly sheet
Her shirt climbs past her waist
Exposing a scant pink frame.
And birds- sparrows
Arguing sweetly
As the girl hangs linens in the sun.

Clank, whirr, clank, whirr

Mechnical man also dreams of a man:
A man he knows to be himself
He does not think he looks
The way
He knows himself to look
This man has no rust, no springs, no hinges
But skin and joints of flesh and bone
His eyes, no condensed resin eyes
His eyes are an optical green, a living green
An iris, a pupil, in a white orb
His face is scarred, but whole.
Clothed shabbily in a dirty white shirt
Carpenter's pants and work boots,
Clutching an ax
A bundle of wood
Muscular, hungry,
He lets go of the ax
And catches the flesh of the girl's perky ass
Tenderly sheltered in a blue
Skirt.

The miracle
Shatters
When the steam whistle screams its bloodthirsty scream
Murdering respite,
Murdering vague recollections of dreams of golden afternoons
Of passion and love and a life outside Weatherspring Mill.

Mechanical man with an oily cough
Cracks his polymer eyes open,
Brushes the shimmering flecks off his chest.

- BottleRocket, Wed. May 21, 2008
[Since you told me I should write more poems, I wrote one for you. It's sitting in my
diary. I want to write love poems, but they're very difficult. Maybe I'll just need
+more practice? ]

※ 最后修改者：nunia, 修改于：2008-07-01 10:11:26 ※
※ 来源：Unknown Friends - 未名交友 http://us.jiaoyou8.com ※