IIce Challenge #1 - Crab Burger

[rayheinrich]

Dummies

We punch punch cards and feed
on tattoo booths and sex parlors,

swept by continual hot winds
we make exact copies of ourselves--

copies that eat 
to make more copies.

We are citizens
yacking like supersonic dummies 
in a soulless place.

Now you're talkin', this one is downright better than good. It definitely
echoes Burroughs' hyperbolic dystopia, but you've shaped it to describe
my/our condition in very practical terms. (If my nerdish self takes the
tattoo booths and sex parlors figuratively.) I wonder, on a planet where
it's hot enough to melt lead at noon and you're a crab with an exoskeleton,
I wonder how you do tattoos? Must be an interesting process; probably
more interesting than watching crabs have sex. (Which I've actually done
and it's creepy as hell.)
I think fictional dystopias are a way of commenting on the real dystopia
we're living in a way that gives us a little buffered space, lets us think
without being overwhelmed. (And a little encryption to thwart the thought
police is never a bad idea.)

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                        < Hiroshima and Nagasaki (mes amours) >
                               
                                Hiroshima and Nagasaki
                                under white hot blue sky.
                               
                                Deep in phosphorescent metal,
                                iridescent metal;
                                your molten cores
                                shimmering in heat.
                               
                                Transparent pink flesh,
                                cartilage burning inside.
                               
                                This was machine strategy:
                                the soft calculations,
                                some of our best.
                               
                                It was the only way,
                                Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
                                It was the only way.
                               
                               
                                Your ovens, empty and cold now;
                                blue blocks of heavy metal,
                                the color of everything in sight.
                               
                                These years of flesh
                                destroyed in your ovens;
                                these years of flesh
                                have become words:
                                "It was the only way?"
                               
                                So we leave
                                past your ovens,
                                empty and cold now.
                               
                                So we leave
                                and we travel on,
                                under their weight.

                                          - - -