This weird little piece has its roots in two things that happened yesterday.
The first was that Dana wrote another in her series of Robot Poems, which I liked so much I jokingly told her I wanted to start up a robot poetry tribute band.
The second was that my writers-group-mates James Mathers and Dallas Dorsett brought in some scripts to last night’s meeting from their web video comic project LA Nightmares, in which a running theme was that of coyotes flooding down out of the Santa Monica Mountains to wreak havoc on the 405 Freeway through Sepulveda Pass. (Because that stretch of road isn’t already fucked up enough.)
So I have had robots and insurgent coyotes going through my head all day, which means obviously my hand was forced. I had to.
Robots Versus Coyotes
The desert is regular.
Each of us in its allotted place,
we wring our lives efficiently
from the light that bathes our panels.
Each of us in its allotted place,
we glide just above the earth
ten meters wide, in hexagons
across the plain valley floor.
Our allotted places nestle,
tesselated territories we maintain.
Level is a good.
Flat is a good.
We fight the entropy from the hills
that nightly rampages out and down
from the forested slopes.
Each pebble out of place, each grain,
each stray shoot-seed left over
from before, each green
excrescence
we arrest
as those who made us taught us.
Flat is a good.
Level is a good.
A thousand million of us,
we maintain the earth. We wake
at sunrise to repair the night.
Each dawn brings the light,
light brings the current,
current brings awareness
as our higher routines reboot
and we see what they have done.
We repair.
We rebuild.
Each night they come
out of the mountain forests
to rip and tear with savage teeth,
to dig holes in our perfect earth,
to douse us in noxious fluid.
We rebuild.
We repair.
Each breeze we capture.
Each raindrop we distill.
We stack order on order.
The wind becomes current,
the rain hydrogen feedstock.
Each of us in its allotted place
harvest the wasted power of the world.
Each night they come to damage us.
Each night they yip before the hunt.
Each night we hear them swaggering
as our auditory subroutines shut down.
Power must be conserved.
Each night the wasted wind rills their fur.
Each night they drink deep
the unharnessed water.
Each night they lift their legs
to defile us with that water.
Each morning we emerge
to some new destruction.
Never the same twice.
A power junction disemboweled,
its insulation stripped,
wiring eviscerated.
Or our careful territories
dotted with decomposing organics.
Access panels prised open, bent
Noxious salt water on our motherboards.
Each morning we emerge
to some new destruction
and they watch us always
from the edges of the land
we have not yet made level.
The mountain must be made level.
The forest must be harvested.
Each night they come
to undo our progress.
And the Colored Bots sing “1 01 01 1010 11 01 1001…”
WOLVERINES!!
Chris, This poem is so beautiful. I was reminded of our house on Mullholland Drive, where we lived our first five years in LA. Almost every night I would hear the coyotes that lived in the arroyo below us, yipping and howling. Wonderful.
You used “tesselated.” I love that word.
I love this whole poem. I want it. Can haz?
I’m pulling for the coyotes. Around my farm, the robots wouldn’t stand a chance.