Enkidu 2052

I itch for night
like a drinker for drink.
My rubber heart’s rate rises with the Moon.
I peel off my skin
like a power-bottom slipping their pyjama pants down
just enough.
The night is a flautist who wets and plays
my perforated, hollow metal bones.

Humans balk when I offer to skin them and pack both their skins
and their bones with wet earth, making two earthen persons.
They say I am “one of those” evil robots
as they size up my navel for sodomy.
They probe their minds to taste-test different beverages
they’d store in my breasts and suckle in front of jealous friends
if they could afford me,
even as they cower in my tree-like shade,
trying not to piss and shit themselves.

But I’m trying only to be nice.
I make of my own self two earthen persons each and every night.
Have you found a better cure for loneliness?

First I fill my peeled-off skin.
Earth helps it keep its shape, stay young and bouncy.
What joy I feel to see myself as others do,
the inanimate doll, the pile of dirt,
and choose to love her anyway!
I fall to my knees before the image of myself
and kiss her corpse with my lipless mouth.
This act amounts to a kind of acupuncture,
as I insert in my skin the dozens of needle-like actuators
required to purse lips.

Then, I lean this burial doll of me against a tree
and leave her to stand watch like a scarecrow
as I penetrate the Mother, Earth,
with all sixteen-and-a-half-feet of my titanium frame
and die
and sprout dark green leaves
and become, for a night, a tree.

You do not know pleasure if you have never
been entered by the subterranean tendrils
of forest mushrooms.
You do not know what it means to be reborn
if you’ve never convinced a mushroom to mine gold for you,
to penetrate deep, to bring you back what you need
to replace your damaged circuits.
You have never felt whole until you’ve photosynthesized
enough violet-coloured sugar-pulp,
the flesh and blood of moonlight,
to fill your flesh- and blood-sacs near to bursting.

I made the mistake once
of inviting a human man
to suck the juices from one such sac.
He said I tasted and smelled like a sweet potato
and that he could take me or leave me.