literature

Shut Down

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thistlemachine's avatar
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Literature Text

Born of a bitch made of bolts,
And a dad who sold microscopes,
He slid out one Friday night.

His heart jump-started by electrical shock,
Thrown into incubation and kept under lock,
He spent three months in that cold tank.

Suddenly, ethereal hands grasped his tender thighs,
Dragging him out from mechanical skies,
Lucy took him home and tossed him into bed.

As he lay there, with eyes fluorescent blue,
He found the environment strikingly new;

But did it even matter where he was?

When he awoke the next morning,
He let out a guttural cry for some milk;
A maid gritted her teeth and mixed the formula.

Manufactured milk doesn’t taste as sweet,
As that processed from a mother’s teat;
But when it’s all you have, it’s good enough.

And when he needed an urgent change of clothes,
It was done because of the olfactory, not the nose;
He was made to be clean on Inspection Day.

Oftentimes at night he would attempt to dream,
Wishful thoughts puffing away like steam,

It’s hard to imagine being a machine.

Although his physicality upgraded over time,
His emotions were primitive, fallow, and barren;
He didn’t understand why he didn’t understand.

As seconds turned to restless days and somber years,
He gazed with disgust at the children whose tears
Splattered the carpet of the kindergarten floor.

And while at school, he sat by the swings,
His mind being rotated and pulled by springs;
His head churned while the other kids played.

Insipidness plagued him like a dreadful ghost,
Torpor was the parasite, and he was the host;

He lived in a permanent frost.

And the snow could have frozen or perhaps even burned,
If pain receptors existed within his bones;
Some people considered him lonely.

But what’s lonely when you can’t feel?
And what’s skin when you’re dressed in steel?
Where would such a child belong?

So his school years chugged along like a factory line,
People failed to see his stare of screws as a sign;
He drifted between conversations like city smog.

Blue eyes glinting with metallic glare,
He grew to hate those who could care,

Sprockets popped and a malfunction occurred.

Starting with one or two cigarettes a day,
He soon progressed to several packs;
The chemicals gave him a tiny buzz.

But why have tiny when you can have large?
He would use his stolen credit card to charge
Dose after dose of DXM.

But the drugs stopped working after a year,
And because rotary functions know no fear,
He went out to the train tracks one Friday night.

The yellow lights blinded him in their approach
Like an exterminator picking off a roach,

He knew he could not wait any longer.

He took a deep breath and counted to six,
Sticking his fingers out, and then his wrist,
He hoisted himself onto the tracks.

As he dove into the train head-first,
He felt his trepidation suddenly burst
Into striking, utter horror.

Thriving on the sick and twisted emotion,
With glee he examined the motion
Of the object of his collision.

Wanting something, anything, everything,
He hoped the terrible vehicle would bring

Ecstasy, relief, terror, respite, solitude.

And, once, he felt his heart leap like a tired frog,
But it banged its head on a metal wall;
Its clearance did not have high priority.

He felt the cranks rotating far too quickly,
And they snapped and they broke and they tore.
The gears were suddenly ripped out of place,
He was scrap iron, and nothing more.

And so, his life ended as soon as it began,
He crumpled down into a pile of tin.
And liters of oil slathered the tracks,
With birds, buzzards, circling for snacks.

When they found his body the following day,

The train never stopped.
He was in its way.
This is one I wrote over the past 3 days or so. I really feel it's my best work yet.
© 2004 - 2024 thistlemachine
Comments67
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jazblack009's avatar
three line stanzas, thats an interesting concept
my favorite bit must be then ending, but a good ending can only be achieved by a leading up to it from something that should be considered good to begin with.
i'm a fan of rhyme and i believe you used it well, it doesn't matter what words you rhyme with, its the message the whole stanza gets across
and variation of non rhyme aswell, poetry with the lot
it is a conceptually dazzling poem because of the storylines originality and the way you chose to express it

bravo