my wife is with me because
on the night that i told her i loved her,
i also said that i wouldn’t let the robots eat her or me,
because i knew the key combination of words
that would shut them down,
you know, just in case they got out of hand
metal beasts ascend, piercing the sky
marveling as the wings stretch high
pointing towards the world below, a mere abstraction,
constructed from reduced fields of data,
digitally deducting
the engines hum,
a techno-rhythmic beat with no rhythm, no rhyme,
as they propel forward in a futuristic fury,
passengers’ faces lit by screens, glazed over,
connected but alone in a frenzied maze
the sky painted over,
as an ethereal frontier with no end in sight
a space to simulate,
an atmosphere to engineer,
an artificial world,
as diesel thickens and explodes in a tragic way that wasn’t foreseen
Fred Aiken Writing 