Feminine principle

Is this about feminism?  I don't know.

I don't like to be political.  It comes from having been brought up in science fiction and we only moved to reality when I was fifteen.  When you've sat up late at night arguing with two land squid and a talking metal box about whether the souls of extinct nihilist cacti should be allowed to marry...  well any minor differences of colour, gender or political persuasion begin to look irrelevant.

This definitely does come from challenging the idea that mechanical men should automatically be assumed to be, err, men.  Even the word "android" is inherently masculine.  "Gynoid" is the feminine equivalent and you don't hear that a lot.  "Homonoid" should probably be the correct term, but then there's "hominid".  Androids probably are hominids, which will freak the palaeontologists...

And don't get me started on the bias in assuming robots should be shaped like people—I mean it's barely true in the real world anyway.  You don't see many industrial robots in sit-down strikes.

Anyway, is this feminist?  I don't know.  Interpretation is, as ever, left as an exercise for the reader.

---

---

Feminine principle

Victoria builds a woman not from ribs.  Sugar, spice :
these also do not feature, this is a different creature...

If you have seen those sexy chromium androids,
drawn by that one guy from Japan.  Gynoids, I should say,
they're not right either, but one might do
as a starting point, although it needs some work.

Titanium blades to turbine round in thousands
of revolutions, a system always humming
if you press her with your ear.  You can also hear
the click of relays as she decides—to love or not to love—

so many losers she can't choose
who to reject first.  This is no bride for any Frankenstein,
this is Kevlar reinforcement on a spine of optical fibre.
This is nerve, in spades, and a cryogenic cool

as she slits fresh fruit with one surgical-steel nail
and raises it to bite.  You might,
and I will, envy the apple,
but, as Victoria says: that isn't the point.

Panicking by increments

A sense of despair,
earlier today...

This is a sonnet, and this is a common type of poem for me, where the only inspiration is a certain mood/emotion that I attempt to capture.

Some people may find these particular sorts of moods bleak, but I don't.  I absolutely cannot explain why, but there is a way in which the abstract contemplation of bleakness is not, in itself, bleak.

It's something like: although bleakness is bleak, bleakness is also appropriate to certain situations and so when considering those situations the bleakness isn't crushingly miserable...  it's appropriate.  It's still sad, of course, but a cool, contemplative, melancholy sad that's relatively sweet.

I said I couldn't explain.  Try the poem instead.

---

 

---

Panicking by increments

The clock unchimed; its moment never came.
Coffee, skinning in the mug, and rain breaking
on the window. Hands trace the tablecloth.
Neither with a task and both quite lost, moths
without a flame. No blame attaches, but shame
stains things. She says she's glad he came --
a third lie for the day. She feels his pain.
It should be more. She wants to score, to regain

the initiative, but then he's gone. She
touches her face, hand to cheek, both cold.
Is that allowed? She's older, and there's less skin
upon the bone now. One day there'll be no she,
the bones unaccompanied. If she were bold...
she's not. She dusts. Unwatched, the clock unwinds.

()

A small, quirky, offering, this time...

How people really think about the World, and their life in it, is one of the great unacknowledged elephants of our time.  We think we're these cool, calm, rational beings and...  ...well basically "rubbish!"  We're more than a little ape, and apes are quite monkey, and monkeys are quite reptile.

This barely touches on that, but there may be some self-deceit going on...

---

()

These events become parenthetical,
sliding past your real life (moments in doorways,
rain-beleaguered; nights in anonymous hotels)
unexamined. You can prove these things don't happen.
The normal rules preclude kissing young ladies
(behind the curl of hair around her ear) naturally
you have no habit of checking
it isn't going on.