As a child I believed no machine
could hurt you, that even the big
crushing ones would stop, would
have to stop, heads bowed, hats
removed, as the royal procession
of a single hand, divinely unaware,
passed among the common columns
of steel and teeth—that no man near
starvation ate berries at night only
to learn their poisonous truth
in the morning, dying, dying
in the snow, before poison, truth,
could be safely passed from mind
to mind, their deadly power wrapped
tight in the guttural cloth of warning.
Now, with the first faint cluckings
of tongues and sighs of the gathering
crowd filtering down, I wait to be discovered
beneath the snows of my life, desperately aware,
ravaged by the machines of yours.
