Villanelle for Love Among the Hard and Soft
Press your gray lips so close to mine, O my cyborg lover!
Your circuits pulse and glow inside, I do attest I feel it:
I sense it in your metal tips, that probe at me all over.
Like dogs who run aground ashamed, like swine who run for cover,
The longing that I have for you, desperation will reveal it.
My soul laps greedily at thy code, my cold hot cyborg lover!
Who or what I really am, I never truly shall discover.
But nonetheless my glee is real, I never could conceal it —
For I think and AM because my human hands do probe at you all over.
Never fear, my dearest love, my four-leaf metal clover.
Thy clockwork heart is safe with me: My love shall take and seal it
‘Gainst friend, ‘gainst foe who’d turn my human heart to soft and fleshly others.
Before I met you, O circuitous one, I resigned to be a rover.
To think of life as fruit to pluck, to plunder and to peel it.
Yet in your shiny, squarish eyes, my true Self I do recover.
O generous Muses, lovers of love! In love’s divinity cloak her!
If her low metal state should violate thy law, have mercy and repeal it.
And do press your gray lips so close to mine, my cold hot cyborg lover!
Know me with thy metal tips that probe at me all over.
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Phew—real steamy stuff. I love the antiquated tone and classical sentiments littered with sensuous e-waste. It’s very dryly funny, and also rather delightfully crass. I’m simpering gaping ear to ear revisiting some of my favorite lines about dogs and swine and clockwork hearts and fleshly lovers and squarish eyes. What’s more, I’m a bit of Luddite and love the Romantics (and maybe seek to emulate them maybe a touch too much, although i’m unsure if that shows), but I have a tough time of trying to write of contemporary things, so smothered in screens and algorithms… so thank you for making that fun and accessible for me.