Steel

Sleek, blue steel
Oiled gears spinning silently.
It moves, 
thinks,
calculates
Without passion, pain, or joy.

Needs no rest!
                     (only time)
Surges ahead!
                     (will kill me)
Never look back!
                     (wear down)
Strong!
                     (wear down)
Raw power!
                     (wear down)

... and with a soft "thud," 
Stop. 
Forever. 

Frozen,
dying without death
In a field of tall grass.
Will not heal.
Silent scream;
I will not be missed,
Unwanted broken machine.
Already I feel the oil thickening.
Already I feel the dust clinging.
In which field will I rot?

--

Her voice weeps
Shatters thin silence with shrill pain.
Pain.
I long to know her, 
Embrace her pain. 
In the land of laughing crying hills
there is beauty
weeping wisdom. 

Weep with me;
Wake the empty machine.

--

A tear
rolls down her cheek, hovers, then
slips into the air.
Earth pulls 
on silvery wake and plume.
But for that tiny ocean sphere,
All things cease.

And the tear 
Splashes off black oil and blue steel,
Entering the gears.
Rust, changes...
gears seize up,
bind together, frozen.
Stuck.

Cold tear, 
pain I never felt.
Stuck gears strain against strain.
Force, bound up, intensifies, 
magnify static energy torsional modulus shearing tension constraining adhesion
loving intense
Explosion.

Gears crumble, 
Rods and cams crack,
Pipes burst.

Machine shatters
Waking Earth, Sky, and Soul.
Rubble falls,
Dust settles.

Quiet: Rising from the scorched death
A flame I call my heart;
Newly stoked, the fire...
Glows, graces, tingles. 

Aaron Joseph Clegg
June 1997, revised Sept. 1997 and April 2000