1529

Republican Victory

Dean Young


In the field, the complex snowmen
have been kicked apart. Some had used
the familiar scarecrow matrix,
others were dead inside, cloned
like modern clocks.

Someone has squeezed the tube out.
Someone has broken the lever off.

I bet this deflated football was a pancreas.
Was it a question of oxygen to the brain?
Here's a whole family: sad.

Soon this field will be hash-marked again,
tackling dummies in formation.
My hands are cold.

At some point, I gave up my youthful
dreams of robotics, of handling toxic substances
with remote control arms. Soon 
there will be robots small enough 
to enter the bloodstream but probably
too late for you and me.

Have you ever looked down
upon your laid-open self and felt
only mildly abashed, foreshortened,
unsequestered, wind in your ears?

That's when the people of the future
contact me with a song
that's actually a series of beeps because
that's what music has become for them,
the people of the future.

Some of their faces are sewn together wrong
so it looks like their pigtails are too tight.

I wish they could tell us all we've done
hasn't come to naught although to them
naught might not be all that bad,
no acid rain, no gapper's block,
where even the homeless can find a home
or at least in theory.

But these thoughts, I'm told,
are but junk mail in a maelstrom
to the people of the future.

They wear shiny visors.
They have beer that glows.
They have rivers that glow.
They'll never forgive us.