“Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we are ourselves are frighteningly inert.” —                                                                        - Donna Haraway (Cyborg Manifesto)

 

Now, unloved and unloving, language becomes only a machine, and the only sex I make is the tickling of the keys, climbing in and out of metaphors I do not feel, but know only in my mind as theoretical and conceptual jargon. Absentmindedly, I round the bases. I score, but do not celebrate. These machines of metaphor are a techno-landscape where poetry becomes just a joke you once heard, where love is only a punch line you’ve mostly forgotten—a punch which punches back. I can no longer be reached. I can no longer be touched. Intimacy is just language softened into liquid. But I am only rock and machine. The cat scratches my tongue. Love is no longer verb, no longer a craft and a making but rather a slow hardening into salt too long left out—solidifying the heart into pure machine, a machine which no longer has any need for oil.