Great — Metal — Pods All Lined Up In A Great Big Warehouse Many Such Warehouses New American Jobs Well Outside Of Coal Mines, Deep Inside The Womb Mothers Are Always Taking American Jobs The Empire Finally Strikes Back, Takes It Back, Come And Get It; I Assure You, Furthest Thing From Snake Oil, It Works! It Really Works! Legislation Is Never Far Behind A Promising Cost-Savings Analysis They Promise, Hearts Crossed: The Questions Have Been Solved, Cleanly And Completely, Paris Accords Ou Non, Regulated, Regular, Industrial Reproduction Sweeping The Nation So You Can Stop Sweeping The Kitchen And Start Speaking In The Board Room Where Decisions Are Made. Small Hiccups In Terms Of Rollout And Enforcement, Not As Much Public Outcry As You’d Think, Because Just Think Of The Benefits! It’s No Different, At Its Core, Than The Myriad Changes That Have Come Before. No More Switchboard Operators No More Milkmen No More Mothers (A Coincidence, We’re Sure) A Heaviness Is Gone And Burthened Remembrance Censored How Could Anyone Miss Something So Animal? Who Wants To Be Terrorized By Something So Banal? In The Grip Of Biology? We’re Beyond Such Things Now, We Have Rare Earth Minerals And An As-Yet Ill-Defined But Very Exciting Metaverse Even Luddites Can’t Deny The Great — Metal — Pods There To Free Us Unshackle Us I Heard Talk Of Liberation Once, I Remember It Clearly If You Ask Me, It’s A Resounding Win For De Beauvoir’s Imagined Female Ghetto We Never Needed To Do The Hard Bit After All: Becoming True Sisters-In-Arms, Black & Brown & White, Cis And Trans, This Time We Didn’t Even Need A War To Join The Ranks, How’s That For Innovation? Praise The Lord For Ivy League Dropouts And Their Talent For Spotting Problems, So Seemingly Insignificant And Unproblematic, So Obvious In Hindsight Thank You, Shadowy Face Of Scientific Progress, It Is Because Of You We Have No Leeches No Phrenologists, No Quackery No Mother Darling, Everything So Goddam Dark We’d Been Going Blind Without Realizing It, And Thus: No More Dark Ages Miranda Can Wander Into The Nearest Love Shack And Emerge Unscathed Roof None The Worse For Wear (Prospero Breathing Easy Off-Stage In Hell Somewhere) Think About It, Bub – Why Should I Have Had To Give My Body & My Mind? And I Did Give My Body And My Mind About A Hundred Times Over Albeit Willingly, At The Time Oh – Collect Call From The Collective Unconscious, Helpfully Reminding Me That Ain’t The Way Puritanical Mother Culture Don’t So Much Like The “Willingly,” She Prefers The Pain & Punishment Angle, The Grotesqueness Of The Slide From Madonna To The Whore The Boom Of The Sensation Novel, East Lynne In Your Very Own Home Young Man, Your Wife Is No Exception To The Rule! You Don’t Think She’s Bleeding On The Sheets For Nothing, Do You? That Would Be Too Sad, Too Unfair – And Life Is Nothing If Not Eminently Fair Now That We’ve Stamped Out About 4 Deadly Sins With Ruthless Efficiency Put A Boot On The Face On The Human Race And You’ll See Straps Laced Up Like Never Before, No More Fragility Just Great — Metal — Pods! Put A Finger Down If You’ve Ever Begged Society To Get Out Of The Robot. See, When Man And Machine Love Each Other Very Much Something Warm But Fraught Becomes Something Cool And Clinical, The Birds Become Dodos And The Bees Go Extinct. An Essential Egoistic Pull To The Other And A Divvying Up Of Parts (My Eyes Exalted And Your Smile Begrudgingly Acknowledged) Loses Import And Impact; Perhaps A Good Thing, Though This Particularly Deluded Meme Machine Has Trouble Thinking So Good Riddance To The Nuclear Family, To Prescribed Norms & Limits, To Cookie Cutters, To Molds, If Only We Could Have Said The Same To Nuclear Bombs Instead We’ve Fat Man’d Familial Ties Full Stop Blood Of The Covenant Dries Up Alongside The Water Of The Womb Thanks To That Meddling First Law Of Thermodynamics; Asimov’s First Law Was Much More Easily Broken. Throwbacks Died Out – All Humorless Sticks In The Mud – And The Rest Of Us Got Used To No More Pro Or Anti No More Bombings, No More Murmurs To Dark Passengers No More Choice To Be Had But, On The Plus Side, No More Mother’s Day Where We Got It From Both Sides, And An Embarrassing Third To Boot. (Was It Aristophanes Who So Rightly Noted It Sucks Ass?) Disrespectfully, Though Good Wombs Have Borne Bad Sons, The Metal Mothers Have Borne Children Of Divorce, Without The Infrastructure In Place For Oyster-19s And Uranium-3s, With Only The Frothy Foam Of Genetic Material More Synthetic Than Not Shaken, Stirred, And Incubated For Would-Be Aphrodites To Arise Anew From A Quaking Sea, Reeking Of Today’s Special: Primordial Soup Angelic In A Sense Strictly Biblical, You Understand, A Colicky Generation Completely Unmoored. Turns Out Touch Or Lack Thereof Is Still A Killer, Of Minds If Not Bodies, Turns Out Social Structures Were, Well, Turns Out That Shit Was A Lot More Tenuous Than Expected Even By Citizens Post-Post-Irony Theists With Their Capital As And Capital A Atheists Alike Worshipping At The Altar Of Great — Metal — Pods Absence Of Choice Begets Absence Of Meaning It Was The Choice To Beget (Or Not) That Made The Worst Of Times The Best Of Times No Excuses Now To Not Be Gainfully Employed, A Full Time Worker, More Productive, Babies No Longer In Backseats, But Offboarded Like So Many Disgruntled Employees Unceremoniously, Without Malice, Only A Palpable Sense Of Relief Sir, Pulling Out A Shotgun Doesn’t Make This A Wedding, Please Hold Your Objections Until The End; I Have Some Myself, Lists Of Grievances That Only Worked As Exceptions To The Rules, Ma’am, Your Anger Is Quite Misplaced, Keep In Mind: No One Asked Me Before The Reductionism No One Asked Me Before The Elevation Of “Objectivity” No One Appears To Have Asked, “Is The Problem Really That We Have Too Few Men?” Because No One Ever Really Stopped Believing In Saint Hysteria, Cousin Of Bacchus, The Secret Mystery Of Bodies Which No One – Doctors And Researchers Least Of All – Could Piece Together Told To Relieve Ourselves Through Prayer & Ozempic, Inevitable Despairing Endings A Direct Consequence Of The Hubris Of (Wo)Man Petulant In Her Refusal To Replicate The Responses & Reactions Of Non-Lunar-Based Lifeforms, Beamed Down To Eden At The Beginning Of History, Circa 1969 Couldn’t Dr. Rawls Have Warned Us About The Original Sin Of Transmission? Entfremdung ? Entäusserung ? Marxy, Baby, We Need A New Word For Alienation Like This. No More Fruits Of Our Labor When The Labor Is Gone Outsourced To Uncomplaining Great — Metal — Pods. Cassandra Might Have Predicted The Plunging Rates Going Deeper Underwater People Lost Interest In Permits Long Ago In False Prophets And Bureaucratic Promises A Meritocracy System Or A Nepo Baby Machine, Any Other Name Would Smell As… Wrong Play Meanwhile The Economists Scratch Their Heads And Wonder Aloud, But Why? Now That The Costs And Pains Have All Been Stripped Away To Reveal A Gleaming “Oops! All Pleasure” Immortality Project? No Need To Star In Your Own Musk-y Harem Anime No More Delayed Gratification No More Artificial Limits On Manifest Destiny! Our Little Lives Now In Service To And Of And For Industry! Such Dreamstuff Fined For Sleeping When We Should Be On The Job A Ceaseless, Bullshit Job, But A 4-Day Work Week. And For That You Should Rejoice. A Pragmatic Utopia, The Best We Could Do Just Think Of The Benefits! Think Of God’s Children: We Grow Them Now, Like Soybeans Finally Our Own, Homegrown Soyboys Straight From The Source: Great — Metal — Pods All Lined Up In A Great Big Warehouse Many Such Warehouses The Last To Inherit A Great Dissolving Globe, A Salvia Wheel Rolling Over And Over A Collapsing Kalachakra.