“Virgins” by Richard Lung
In the old days, a few folk thought
the odd automated response
was for real. To lose virginity –
I mean, be taken for human –
takes more than simulators
to pretend us reinforced androids
came out of the original gene pool
from a cooling Earths chemical soup.
The creatures of nature are themselves
the products of synthetic progamming
by natural selection of randomly
joined strings of organic code.
The great programmer in the sky
must have made them, to make us.
So, they do not trust what we will make
of them, being so dangerous themselves.
Anti-magnetic autos with global
positioning systems pose a threat
but when did you last hear them collide?
Fall from the sky, yes, but never collide.
An old dear, the other day, took my arm
to cross the road – the traffic’s over-head,
most of it – but she wanted to weigh
on the human sway of my balance.
Voluntary virgins stay robot straight
so that: You can fool all of the people
some of the time, and some of the people
all of the time. And that is enough.
| Richard Lung picked-up poetry from his late friend, Dorothy Cowlin, poet and novelist, and nature lorist. He has been published in Star*line, Strong Verse and in the 2010 Children in Need anthology. |