this is a poem i wrote about four years ago. it’s only the second poem i ever wrote, i actually still like it a lot, and i wish i had the courage to write more. the ever-present fear of looking like an idiot keeps the irony shields up.

drones are uneasy to me. i’ve always had that teenage boy fetish for sleek weapon systems and military vehicles, i’m not above admitting that. but drones seem like a premonition in a way that i’m not sure has an easy historical parallel. the obvious avenue for comparison is the atom bomb, but that’s both a difference of degree and magnitude. drones are something different – we’re hurtling toward a future of autonomously maintained empire, a historical shift where sovereignty is decoupled from manpower, an immediate after-effect of industrial automation and machine vision. swarm-enforced, mesh-networked, always watching.

i remembered i had written this when i was looking at the header image for this blog. if you don’t know – or you don’t know me – i have that image (general atomics mq-9 reaper) tattooed across my forearm.

anyway, here’s the poem.

reaper

a hawk loiters

at 60,000 feet.

there are cameras.

_

the network is ether;

supernatural framework to facilitate divine will.

_

we know that God is real now

and that He sees everything.

His angels blast

dull klaxons over asia.