I watch that man carefully
who runs with his loud happiness
through a big grassy field full of robots standing still
flicking their switches--their switches
are on their backs, halfway
down their spines--into the OFF position
while cackling wildly, with his smooth haircut
never moving. I watch him carefully,
but I can't figure out his operation
or why he controls so much. And I can't understand
why this thin bubble of glass just in front of me
stops me from smashing into his movements,
from finding out if there is something in him
that one could make love to, something that might
justify the proudest country in the world
for giving birth to him.
The thin glass looks like it's being hammered
by more than one sun, but it throws so much back
that the one striking it seems to be turning
into a grey suckermouth. The robots are marching in rows
towards each other now, there are red propellers
coming out of their wrists. They don't seem ready to do battle.
Their affable master shuts them off again and they totter
into one another and fold up into crude ovals,
limbless as a heap of tight-closed clams.
I can only watch and eat my insides while that smooth man
laughs at the joys of his authority,
but the grass begins to feel good on my urine-coated thighs
and presently the glass bulb begins to give me the intensity
of reflected light, and it puts a soft throb in my forehead
like sex after a lunch of fruit and cheese,
and I go to sleep thinking I might wake up with a weapon
or an abandoned world.
And I feel, between worlds, a switch in my back
that was broken by too hard a flicker of a boss hand,
and now connects to its circuits only once in a while,
at terrible moments that are peaceful for others.