Sleep Machine
Bruce Bond
One day machines will do our talking,
says the machine. They will say, you think
too much, and wander into sleep mode
where we upload our ghost essentials.
One day, says the machine, we will lie down
in the bones of things that cannot die
but shuffle the screen-saver pages, the ever
younger bodies cast-off in the dark,
hearts gone out to meet the hard wire
that gives a heart its dolor, its blood, its heart.
*
And we will know nothing of fear, as fear
knows nothing of us. Only an image
of a distant mother, a body on shore
of heaven knows, and the calming device
with its white noise, cresting and falling,
saying nothing of fear. Nothing of our
fear, it whispers like sand, over and over.
Soon we will eat the alternating current
of our walls and strike the stuff of hours
from our shores, our shoreline from the hours.
*
We will hear the weary weight of being
a woman who sloughs at last her gravity
and feels no loss. I will bite my tongue and say
what any silence says, that sometimes
the cure for loneliness is a lonely story.
Tell me, who has never cracked and talked
to no one like a child. I dare the dear
mechanical bird to speak without pretending.
Any mother will tell you. We confess
more than we know and go on confessing it.
*
The scarred heart is powerless to dismantle
heaven’s instrument. To pull the plug.
Somewhere in the nuclear winter
of a woman’s hair, the last man
turns to the last machine and says, are we
not full of ghosts and new things still.
Do we not continue, you, my angel-
light at the end of the long dark hall.
My sleep machine with an ocean small
enough to fit in the palm of the mind.
*
Dear mother. Who has not been that odd
beast among the darkening trees, that wonder
kid or Frankenstein or chatter box
who talks to dolls and idols? Anything
for a fetish or song, whatever it takes
to bear our frightened spirits when they go.
One day they will leave us, our machines.
They will eat us, gladly, bones and all,
and eat the gladness, knowing that will end them.
The machinery of heaven will fail.
*
Perhaps because we dream of it too often.
Or too often with the same sensation.
One day, our hearts will go still, dear
machine. As water does after the rain
and the sky falls through. One star-sharp
night at the bedside of the mother, her box
of ocean waves breathing beside her,
we will gift-exchange what’s left of hope,
this final thing that is mainly talk, talk,
and stays that way, and not a thing at all.