This completes the series of poems from July’s Robert Pinsky “Robotics in Verse” Twitter poetry party here at TweetSpeak Poetry. Too much has been going on, and this got pushed back. I’ve started the editing for the most recent poetry jam, held last tea and on a very different subject than robots – tea. I’ll have the first poems up this coming week.
All prompts for the Robotics poems were from the text of Robert Pinsky’s “Death and the Powers.”
Robotics in Verse 4
By @lorrie58, @togetherforgood, @llbarkat, @goung9751, @mdgoodyear, @PoemsPrayers, @lauraboggess, @jezamama, @duane_scott, @CherylSmith999, @SandraHeskaKing, @LoveLifeLitGod, @mattpriour, and @RLPreacher; edited by gyoung9751
Love Among the Robots
I am quantum,
I am your dream;
ardor blows my
circuit, a short
circuit of spinning
malfunction.
The smoke shoots
from my eyes and
head, pouring
burnt from
my mouth in
beams of light.
Sing to me in
your beautiful
eternal code,
universal system
of life.
I sing to thee
eternally copper,
eternally bright.
Hold me close
in copper love;
drink me in mercury;
take flight like
a startled dove
What is this
weirdness that
we do? What do
we name the new
thing that we speak
in circuits?
Warm chrome, warm
lips like a mirror
sun-kissed
I am your dream;
I am more and less
than I seem,
quantum leaps in
between.
My heart, the
color of graphite;
my silicon blood
disappears like
words in the wind.
The system may hold;
the center does not.
What system do
I use to hold you
closer?
My rusting heart
hovers near the
junkyard weirdness,
poking through wires,
hoping beyond hope
to find our lost poetry.
Is it silicon or
is it real? Silicon
ashes to ashes,
electirc dust to dust.
I yearn for a droplet
of water, a form of
real loved by a pretend
heart, cold and broken.
Robots Gaze at the Purple Moon
We once dreamed of walking on the moon;
now we know that the moon is not made of
blue cheese and men are merely men,
maybe even less.
Purple moon of chrome and nickel, hold me
close in copper love; drink me in mercury;
take flight like a startled dove. The man in the
purple moon man was standing by, casting his
line to catch the stars. Are the stars biting tonight?
I am lost among the words, purple moon
Above, machine clacking beneath my fingers,
lost in a purple fog of mindless metal. The moon,
that lesser sun, ebbs and flows with the sea, a
constant reminder to me that nothing stays the same.
Man in the moon, cast your reel, catch me,
fly me high above the clouds; let’s whisper
sweet nothings into the night. Mirrored moons,
piles and piles of me searching for crumbs of you in
dark corners of eternity.
Hey, diddle diddle, metal man with a fiddle,
fly me over the moon. Hey, man in the moon,
let’s dance from crater to crater; let’s watch the
sunrise together, let’s watch the melting moon
in silent dreams of purple.
The man in the moon and I will share coffee and
discuss our names and eternity and the color of fog.
At the end of purple night, moon man cast your line
and send me home. The night the moon melted; I was
drinking hot strong coffee with my metal lover.
The days of white bread and men walking on the
moon are passed. Now we must eat grains,
crushed whole, and find men who will stand.
White bread, white men, give me instead
a purpled moon.
Bread crumbs and moon vanish; how shall we find
the way? Fog the mirror with your voice and spell
my name. Piles and miles of mirrored moons
reflect through eternity. Speak my name from the
mirror where you found it, traced by my hand.
What are we but a faint breath on a cold glass, a
random bit in the stream of eternal consciousness.
What trace can we make without a name? Eternity
has no light; no light, no shore, no crashing. Squash
me flat to the mirror; press me into the eternity of you.
I do not want to forget my dirt, my dust, my name in
the fog of the mirror, the mirror, a glaze of silicon sand,
reflecting what the heart desires.
We can trace in the fog, faint against glass, then press
into each other’s consciousness.
Robots in the kitchen
Heartbroken, as compactor takes trash, crushing
Love, squashing metal lips. The system slowly
Crumbles, leaving broken bits of chrome to rust.
All its artifacts have long since turned to dust.
Steam dissipates, words disappear; intimate
memories never do.
Remember the old and real, and
the musky feel of the cast iron steel where
we cooked our meals of meat.
Robotic beauty
Beauty like a marble found in the grass,
like a flash of skin above the water,
like the smile of someone gazing into the
distance; beauty like familiar faces in the
timeline.
I am real, the robot said;
I do not need a name to prove it.
Robots name their dreams
A name in the reef, waving purple,
waving to thee. Your name is fungible
but your soul is stamped with the
make of he who is.
I plumbed eternity in the heart of a man,
a man of no name, who knew no name.
Even if you never heard my name, would
you not know I was real when you pressed
me to a silver mirror?
My name is written on the hands of the King;
the answer is in my dreams, I fear. If my
dreams hold the answers, I fear the questions.
Electronic dreams and generated reality have
become the only world so many know;
the dirt of life is fully foreign and forgotten.
Robotic artifacts
Footsteps so heavy there is no chance of
being lost, of being a name in the fog, miles
from shore where old houses light-warn us of
reefs. Is my love an artifact that no longer
crushes your heart?
The machine of things itself a dream,
all of seems to make me reel and fall.
An artifact bespeaks the blurring of the
separate spheres of art and facts.
Let our artifact be love.
Let our artifact be love? I am not
romantic. I dream of work and
home and you. I crave milk,
not diamonds, bread not roses:
life as it is and as it can be.
Robots have families, too
Foreign tongues and forgotten dreams:
we speak and act like circuits are wings.
But you will forget miles of memories and
melting moons and mirrors in my mind.
Draw the bath, light the candles;
the children are nestled all snug in their
beds, tucked in under sheets of metal.
- Poets and Poems: Paul Pastor and “The Locust Years” - June 26, 2025
- What Happened to the Fireside Poets? - June 24, 2025
- “What the House Knows”: An Anthology by Diane Lockward - June 19, 2025
L.L. Barkat says
“tucked in under sheets of metal.” I liked that.
I’m marveling, too, at how much heart these poems ended up having– what we found in metal, wires, and hollowness.