Poetry... at least what's left of it, is all I have to contribute to this modern world inundated with a few hundred years of beauty and ingenuity beyond the whole collection of mankind, at least in comparison to the last 100,000 years. What we have accomplished as a species is incredible. But with that, the joy of prose, rhyme, verse, and thoughtful contemplation via creative weavings of words is a dead art. Perhaps this is because there are only so many ways to describe the color blue before the yawnings commence and repetition ensues.
So I emphasize, if you like the way poetry sucks, then let this vacuum have its way with your mind and swirl you at 3am into the vacant places of the internet.
Welcome to what may have once been the works of a great poet, perhaps born on the wrong planet in the wrong season of its solar system in the vast and endless void of space and what we call time.
Steam in the tank, power to push, pull, turn, compress, and flow.
A measuring device conmected to the tank, unfamiliar to me, I study the manual.
Nothing relevant in here… only engineering specs. I realize, reassuring me why I get paid.
It is up to me to understand how the symbols, dials, bellows and springs make this device speak coherently to a control operator.
I imagine him now, sitting at his console, waiting for the Great Machine to tell him what he needs to know, without actually knowing.
My new friend, the instrument I am going to work on, is perhaps much like a wild beast that was once domesticated, but has gone rogue-robot and deviated from the language it once spoke with another long before me.
Its manual is old text-written, revealing the age of its creation to a time long before computers were mainstream.
The mechanical creature is lost and needs only an adjustment or two. I manuever with my intuition, remembering the ancient ways I have studied in 1980’s pneumatic to analog technology.
The wild machine is tame once again, for now. Speaking old with new, we are connected once more.
The control operator is pleased with his console, he tells me. Our work here is done.
The wild steam is no longer a threat, and the beast within the Great Machine is soothed from its restless stirrings and sleeps again.
I walk away from the slumbering monsters, and return to my station. My wizardly supplies back to where it belongs.
Without my knowledge in the ancient ways of pneumatic level transmitters, this land would be in chaos.
Poetry Sucks 