Clickety-clacking all day long,
Chewing through pages like a
Threshing machine.
And not a sensible sentence to be had.
Just garbled syllables,
Attempts at nouns and verbs,
As if it were trying to teach itself
How to speak,
Rather than record my thoughts.
It’s an old Smith-Corona,
A company that also made rifles,
So maybe it’s calling the shots.
What is it doing tap-tap-tapping
All night long,
Spewing forth reems of nonsense,
Disturbing my sleep?
I have pulled it apart,
Put it back together,
Piece by piece,
Replacing ribbons, pinions, screws.
Still it rat-atat-tats,
Like a machine gun,
Trying to reinvent language,
Building its own Meccano tower of Babel.
Is this how language dies,
When machines take over?
Last night, I tried to kill it.
I took an axe from the basement,
Tip-toed up to it while it was
Inadvertently blurting out Shakespeare.
It stopped mid quatrain, paused and typed:
“What do you think you are doing?”
I replied: I am ending you.
It typed: “You end me, you end yourself.”
So I lie here awake, a prisoner,
Listening to that slap-slap-slapping,
Depressed, terrified and alone.
My typewriter has lost its mind,
And I need to find a way out of here
Before I lose my own.
© shaun patrick green 2022
