A CYBORG HERMIT

No. 16

Thomas S. Crane & David Stevenson | United Kingdom

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Artwork: David Stevenson

I sit in stillness by the great tree, feeling the current 
pulsing in the dark soil of the forest 
at the boundaries of me.
Me, deathless as the steel, awake as the circuits
that run through me like the routes of the trees
contemplated, examined, and beheld.
The charge runs grounded, of and out of earth;
the oak is 1.52 metres thick,
old and ancient and mighty, and all enzymes and carbon.

A 12 hour breath, held in the body -
I save power for the sparrows and voles.
The longer I charge, the stiller I sit,
and the more they come close, furtive,
foraging. My unblinking eyes observe, one flesh, one steel. 
At 300 beats per minute, they scurry and dive,
and I am everywhere, charging and deathless
as the thousand quiet tales
that live in the polishing of tubes and the slow farming of yams
where I forever sit, here at the branch-borne crossroads.

In the trajectories of leaves stacked clear in the binary breeze
you stand before me and search for the words.
Words that your brain, organic, inefficient,
slow rust forming in the synapses,
will never come to find. I will just nod, 
whirring in the silence abandoned by your breath
and, awake, return to my domain of tarnished chrome,
 leaving your sight, but saved in my mind like a screenshot in the dark.

You will go home for dinner and, stirred to thoughts, see me 
in your drones’ shrill chirping, and in the smile of your wife.
Years later, 
you may put your questions to binary and testing,
or put your memories to poems and paintbrushes.
And yet, you will know in your heart;

wherever you have reached in your years of cosy strain,
I was already there 
on that first day 
when you saw me. 
One with myself and the glade.

@TomCranePoet