Alpharoman II

AWT-aught
The light flickered,
Screens upon screens of
Cathode rays
Radiation battering the earth for millions of years.

Organic resistance, natural resistance
Has faded. I am only
Smooth flesh and machine-coupled now.

Like a bursting shotgun,
The cannonade of a blunderbuss,
He appears. He that is not me. He that will be me.
Myself, minus one year.

“We’ll
Skip
The
Jokes…”

Two-eight, forty five,
The room does not illuminate with his presence. But
It is as he feared,
I am lost in a way that he is not yet lost.
We are doing this backwards. He knew my future better than
I understand my present
And he decided to save me.

His words to me,
Or my words to myself
My battle-mantra,
Read ‘fangs and fists and thorns
I will resist.’ I see
Those calluses upon him, his
Fortification,
His will stronger than I can ever remember.

“I locked the door
To save you from
What you wanted.

And you tore down that door.”

I did. My desires…
Well, he knows them
Almost as well as I do. Only the last
Tangents remain unknown to him.

Baker, victor, echo,
FOXTROT,
“So,”
He says, with authority I cannot have known,
“I came to save you.”

My mind whirls with ifs,
Causality impenetrable,
I mouth a half-dozen ‘hows’ without
Coherence.

“If I knew,” understanding me despite it all,
“That I would become you,
Then why not change myself?
You are here. You exist, you live
A broken life
A life I could envision
To tear you out of it is better
Than to close my eyes to all that might be
And therefore is.”

He shall
Break the concrete stranglehold
So I do not question him. Save for one matter.

Aitch, oh-for, tee:
What of this year? I gasp,
“A year lost,
A year poured out like blood
Sacrificed to no stone god,
Redeeming no people or person,
It is not to be reclaimed.
You must bear it, you must know it
From the outside, as I do,
Then your freedom shall not
Be considered nothing,
And you shall not need
My further intervention.”

He showed me
Time from the outside
My life, the life that bore his name and face and body and was not his,
And I knew that I was free,
That I could never go back
That I would wear this moment
For all time.