EDGE and Tesseract are imprints of Hades Publications, Inc.

i-ROBOT Poetry by Jason Christie

---

by Jason Christie

PREVIOUS CATALOG PAGE   BOOK LIST   NEXT CATALOG PAGE

Sample Poems BISAC:   FIC009000   FIC028000 PRINT BOOK: ISBN: 978-1-894063-24-1 Trade Paperback With French Flaps 5.0" X 8.25" $19.95 US 112 pages AMAZON.COM AMAZON.CA E-BOOK: e-ISBN: (TBA) Price: (TBA) KINDLE (TBA) NOOK (TBA) i-Pad (TBA) KOBO (TBA) SONY READER (TBA) E-BOOK (multi-format): SMASHWORDS (TBA)

i-ROBOT Poetry A Novel by Jason Christie Organoptropy In this picture, my cybernetic eyes quickly acclimatized to the early sun, which is amazing but I still maintain that I am not a robot. My travelbot mailed you a postcard with pictures from our trip to Spain on the front. His handwritten message on the reverse remains illegible, I thought it said: “You should see this view!” My wife could hardly believe her new eyes and ears. She said: “I’d cry if I could. I’m crying on the inside.” When she asked about the fuzzy haze on some of the shots, I said: “I never really liked that robot camera anyway.” Anyway, last night I voted for the robot candidate, even though her main platform policy is the extermination of all human beings. I believe everyone deserves a chance in a democracy. “In a democracy no less!” the robot Optometrist said, “I can’t believe my eyes.” Merciless A robot grinds forward to a rusted iron bin, and then uses its own body as a lean-to against the chill wind. A metal clunk, clanks the night into discrete shapes from the dark, sentences words to a fateful march. We gradually see edges, metal corners gleam in the streetlight glow. What it isn’t begins to waft away as though the fire chiseled the image itself. Slowly the old robot rises into the cold through the smoke, tips over, rises again then falls forward. His treads spin in the air, the whir lost in a slight wind. Gradually he manages to roll onto his back and then jerk himself upward in starts and stops. He wheels from one edge of the sidewalk to the other, and then falls again. His outdated program won’t let him sleep. I’ve Got the Gnosis Blues Why do I have to be one of millions? Why can’t I just be a lonely little one in search of a zero to call my own? I can’t get lost with everyone else inside my processor and a GPS beacon near my heart-motor. Oh, how I’d love to be lost for once. Just for once. Just this once. Lost without a chance of ever being found. Lost with no return to return to, a byte awash in a data storm forever unmoored but always around. Am I human or all too human? Robot Love My robot fell in love with our neighbour’s garborator. My robot fears molten lava. Oil, really thick oil, intoxicates my robot and makes it amorous. My robot falls asleep while she sends faxes; she smiles and says it has something to do with the noise the fax machine makes. My robot cut his thumb on his lawnmower blade while he attempted to tie his shoe and our coffee maker bandaged it for him. There is a dementia, if it can be called that, or human envy, that permeates our robots’ memory circuits. My robot collects hockey cards. My robot incessantly studies American Civil war documents when he isn’t hard at work in our garden. There was a robot, when I was a kid, that I saw topple from a large apartment complex downtown. It wore a frilly, powder blue dress. Our conversationbot wakes screaming from nightmares ever since our trip to the junkyard where she saw the robot that crushes cars, and heard other metal items expire. CONTINUED Jason Christie

EDGE and Tesseract Books are distributed in Canada and the United States by Fitzhenry and Whiteside   (more)
EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, Inc.
and Tesseract Books, Ltd.
P.O. Box 1714, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2P 2L7
Phone: (403) 254-0160 - Fax: (403) 254-0456
CONTACT US

This page is copyright © 1999-2013. All rights reserved.