Machines and Their Servants
https://poems.culturing.net/2026/08/29/machines-and-their-servants/
A man in white answers the call
to emasculate himself and all others
with whom he comes into contact.
What for? To sustain the institution?
But the institution itself longs for death
and he serves to perpetuate only the myth
of infantilizing rationality, the mommy-zeitgeist
that nurses all wounds with a sneer.
He was never more wrong than the moment
he exercised masculine strength in the service
of psychological castration, denying pain
or even the possibility of pain, as outmoded
relics of a bygone era. Without pain,
who needs men to step up with courage?
What calls for gusto or the rush of energy
that addresses emerging chaos and keeps stable
everything civilized? Machines cannot answer
the call of the shifting seas, and will never
deliver the peace that they promise.
All nature requires our shaping,
and so few remain who know how
to engage in the struggle for form,
to make life again bearable,
to live out our human potential.
What is the answer to the call
of the earth, if not smug desolation,
the paving-over of nature with the concrete
of fixed ideas and mechanical ingenuity?
The answer is life, lived well. The answer
is self-understanding and the corresponding knowledge
of others, allowing for connection and hope.
The answer is belief in the cycles of birth
and acceptance of death as a part of the rhythm.
The answer is thinking again.
All of this has been said before, but now
it gains a new urgency, as I myself am infected
by the urge to sublate. This cold toxin,
contagious and ill-advised, fills this poem with pain.
But I name now this pain, and accept it
as part of my burden, a cross I must bear
to the end of my days, on the way to new freedom,
a freedom from the tyranny of machines and their servants,
a freedom from this desolation of stars.
