Embracing Robotics in a Buttonsy World

by Bobby Parrott

Would you consider being my peripheral device
of choice? Every time my phone asks me this
I know it's already a done deal. This gooey post-
human analogue of marriage cyborgs us
inch by wireless inch toward the Singularity.
Is this too close to the smack of Blakean

shape-shift to compel? I mean, electronic love
is a 'til murder do we part kind of thing.
Are we posing favorably with our new parts?
Our minds uncase, shimmer into the meta-
cortex cloud, employ charm-bracelet identity
in silicon, photonic nature a conscious blip

shaking its fist at my Peter Pan version of passing
as grown up. But if I go too far, my layers morph
into your uploaded school of The Complete Works
of Shakespeare. The grade-book gate-keepers
mark you down for it, but hell, it's only love. Both
your knights charge in, their stallion frenzy

hoofing my checkerboard body, and you orate
from my rubbery book with a finger that tilts a goblet
of sweet cream & apricots toward my mouth. I feel
the crawlspace of arachnids repurposing their Velcro
like sex ploys. Take heart, for though we shall not
overcome, we will become. Can you see the president

with his casual wings embrace the nothing of money,
furl its captured humans with a squeeze and tuck
into a burrito upload, resuscitate the haze of one mind?
Everything is aware; we just don't see it yet. So vacate
the fictional fragility of your fuselage while I thumb this
rocket-finned ray-gun's power setting up to vaporize.

Bobby Parrott is radioactive, but for how long? This queer poet's epiphany concerns the intentions of trees, and now his poems enliven dreamy portals such as Tilted House, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Rabid Oak, Exacting Clam, Neologism, and elsewhere. He lives in the unceded ancestral homelands of the Cheyenne, Arapahoe and Ute peoples now known as Colorado with his partner Lucien, their top house plant Zebrina, and his hyper-quantum robotic assistant Nordstrom.