When I'm with you,
*My hard shell
Turns soft and human.

chest pressure like a wasted life
hiding from the possibility
of living I have never spilled these
few years into anything
except for everything
this is the unbeatable monster of
nothingness and robotic arrogance
of undeniable certainty
I AM TRUTH I HAVE TRUTH
spilling over my cup runneth over with
disdain and my teeth are sour
from sleeping I hate the taste
of sleep
in my mouth like over-chewed mint gum
cliche stories have never
clicked with me
I would like to watch you smile for
a few hours before I believe
the pressure in my chest is
legitimate life will die
'***** u man in sky'
I believe that this will not

What I have is a mechanical heart made up of gears;
it pumps up oil and artificial heartbeats

It was you who gave it life—
It was you who made me alive—

Even though it's already yours,
I just want you to know,
You're the only one it's beating for.

I've gotten so used to greyscale
On this faulty monitor
That I've almost forgotten what colors look like
As they dance across the screen

I have had enough of this monochromatic monotony
So I snip wires, rip out cords
Do anything I can to see if I can get the color back
The only cable I leave alone is the one connecting it to the wall

I stand there in the robotic wreckage
And see a bit of red blinking on the screen
My world is not yet in technicolor
But this is a start.

I have shifted the tide, so to speak--
not held captive to the flaws of men
or the romanticism of it--
I no longer have the inclination
to adore atrocity or
to revel in insanity,
But,
in sanity,
I am numb to these vibrations,
numb to the feeling of happy or sad,
because coping is another word
for "robot"-- I'm the analyst now,
I'm in love with logic,
and so life goes on,
without a further nod from me.

Intellect without emotion, someone told me once. That's how they described me.  That I had more wit and sarcastic charm than I could ever need, and yet I  couldn't do anything meaningful with it because I lacked anything real…..like empathy, selflessness…or love.  I was the cleverest robot in the world.

The truth is I do have emotion. Bounds of it.  It pours out of me through cracks I forgot to seal when I walled myself in.  And any attempt it makes to grow a garden is flooded by preemptive rain clouds, conjured up by a self imposed reality wherein the world sees my face in the daylight for what it really is and burns down my garden anyway.

I am no robot, I just hide behind cold metal plates and careful calculations, as if I could possibly predict consequences to chances I never take, moves I never make, and broken down walls I never break. So that the outcome is that i'm the loneliest, cleverest robot in the world, who discarded his humanity for a safety net and a bottle of cheap thrills, a bottle he uses as a telescope to see the rest of world because it looks better through the glass.

In the bowels of the old post office
The printing press, like
a large rusted spider
makes a bed out of *****
yellow paper and
rotted cloth of postal bags.
It bides it’s time pondering
On how it was formed
and listening to the coyotes
at the moon’s apex over
a long stretch of prairie.

Resting in the post office
on a grassed plateau are black
iron machines that walk, crawl
and scurry but shouldn’t.
They spend their days
building nests and staring
into stagnant pools at
their own reflection.
Waiting for someone
to use them.

In moments we suffer we’re like sweet dispositions
To cry in silence and shiver in pain
It all gets too much and we’ll just implode
Communication and network error: Sorry I cannot hear you
My brain and my thoughts are two different puzzles
My mind and my body are two different vessels
My heart and my soul are entities at war
My hope and my dreams are **** on my bathroom
floor
Why I see to see to see to dream what’s real and know what’s not
Mumble jumble goes my brain
beep beep beep network error
server error
brain is error
error
dead