A Robot Would Never Kiss You With Its Tongue
by Bobby Parrott

Disregard the self-reinventing sentience

of humanoid hearts. Touch the silicone-

embraced servo-controllers to know. Listen

hard with your one synthetic ear—scan

falling in love as a cyberpunk algorithm,

 

especially when a data-nerd like you

risks upload. In a neuromorphic AI chip

hive-mind, a person wants to stand

in a subatomic place, in a maelstrom. Love

by way of quantum computation sees

 

posthuman uplift as pickled brains

on wheat toast, hyperbolic Edgar

Allen Poe 'droids slicing in place. I flinch

at your accelerated smart-clothing,

the electroceutical sleeve you engage

 

to disrupt my identity. We candy-stripe

our musical memes, install a flurry of buglers

blaring "I am the Walrus," then sputter

echoplexed versions no one dares unplug

or re-function, genetic rubber penguins

 

bred to smooth our removal. In Singularity

all human forms decompile their births

as animatronic software, theater of growing

young, egoic wibble-wobble—robotic love-

cycles sporting late-night cybersex simulacra.