The Good Robot...

Been listening to a bunch of Krautrock from the 70's and 80's lately. Not so much Kraftwork, seen here, but healthy doses of Can and Neu! and their related offshoots. Go on and download yourself "Hallogallo" by Neu! or "One More night" by Can. These are the riffs that keep on giving this holiday season.

2005 has been a relentless jackal on the emotions for all of us and the holidays can be especially rough. Therefore, I share with you this sonic Teutonic embrace as part my prescription for staving off the winter blues: Cold, driving, mechanical soul to tame those spastic, fiery demons. Sometime back in October, I began having these recurring thoughts of benevolent robots. I decided that becoming a detached "Robosapien" would stave off the encroaching, dark and despairing Brunhilda, lost in an murky opera of internalized histrionics and warped perceptions. And I was right.

I wrote this "poem" at the peak of my own sogginess, and while childishly simple, the act of writing it seems to have flushed out a new, crisp rhythm... one that savors stable, basic, methodical actions, and uses repetition as reinforcement: A solid frame on which to hang new flesh. May not make it into the New Yorker, but here it is:

RESET

Reset flesh in metal and noble circuitry.
Reset to let the blood back in slowly.
Be a good robot. Be a good robot.
Sea emotions rise and fall.
Observe. Observatory.
Present, pleasant.
No knee-jerk
emoting.
For now.
Embrace the
click clack attack,
die cast the nausea and suspicion.
Breathe, extract, enjoy. Boy, you need to reset.
No sweat. Be a good Robot. Robot be good to me. Now.


Kind of more of a song than a poem maybe. Anhow, I guess sometimes we have to go from one extreme to the other in order to find some sort of balance. May your microchips be merry and bright.