Where Robot Mice And Robot Men Run Round In Robot Towns

That Son of Richard III (#litres_trial_promo)

A Poem with a Note: All England Empty, the People Flown (#litres_trial_promo)

The Syncopated Hunchbacked Man (#litres_trial_promo)

If Man Is Dead, Then God Is Slain (#litres_trial_promo)

Thoughts on Visiting the Main Rocket Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral for the First Time (#litres_trial_promo)

Their Names in Dust, Their Dates in Grass (#litres_trial_promo)

Long Thoughts on Best-Sellers by Worst People (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Prologue (#ulink_cc9f8553-b1df-5812-bf29-2e957d1ad5c7)

They asked me where I’d choose to run, which favored? Ups? or Downs?

Where robot mice and men, I said, run round in robot towns.

But is that wise? for tin’s a fool and iron has no thought!

Computer mice can find me facts and teach me what I’m not.

But robot all inhuman is, all’s sin with cog and mesh.

Not if we teach the good stuff in, so it can teach our flesh.

There’s nothing wrong with metal-men that better dreams can’t chalk.

I’d find me robot-Plato’s cave if he lived on my block;

And though his eyes electric were, computerized his tongue,

Is that more wrong than Berlioz on LPs harped and sung?

So much electric fills our lives, some bad, some good, some ill.

But look! there Shaw and Shakespeare dance on Channel 7’s sill:

A gift of hearts and minds and eyes to see our dark/light face,

To weigh and balance halos/blights that half-destroy our race;

To midget make our rocket-ships, and squeeze grand Kong down small

Then Giants grow from Shavian seed to taunt, provoke us all.

As man himself a mixture is, rambunctious paradox,

So we must teach our mad machines: stand tall, pull up your socks!

Come run with me, wild children/men, half dires and dooms, half clowns.

Pace robot mice, race robot men, win-lose in robot towns.

Byzantium I Come Not From (#ulink_2945dfcf-d83f-53b6-a92f-1cd535916d0b)

Byzantium

I come not from

But from another time and place

Whose race is simple, tried and true;

As boy

I dropped me forth in Illinois,

A name with neither love nor grace

Was Waukegan. There I came from

And not, good friends, Byzantium.

And yet in looking back I see

From topmost part of farthest tree

A land as bright, beloved and blue

As any Yeats found to be true.

The house I lived in, hewn of gold

And on the highest market sold

Was dandelion-minted, made

By spendthrift bees in bee-loud glade.