Rounding off a wee informal month of scifi style postings, I just found this in an old fanzine I used to produce called "refractor"; it was a sort of a conspiracy zine, except I just made up all the conspiracies in it...my favourite was one about the British attempting to use the power of voodoo during the second world war. I stopped doing it when it became clear to me from the disturbing letters and phonecalls I was getting, from the zines readers, that some people really believed what I was saying.
Anyway, a steampunk love poem...
Hearts Without Pistons
That day
The smog hung like a shroud,
Draped grimly
Over the greying decay
Of slowly rusting streets,
And green smoke
From the armament factories
Swirled sickly through gaping chimneys,
Cutting stinking lime streaks
Across the five o’clock sky.
In the park
A circus
Too big for fleas
Entertained the factory children
With clockwork clowns.
“They’ll be thinking for themselves soon.”
“The children?”
“No. The clowns. And the Policemen.
And the Priests.
And all the other tin men
With their wind up hearts.”
The next shift of children arrive
In time to watch the trapeze.
Timing so precise,
No one will ever fall.
At 8pm
A rocket roars upwards,
Gleaming brass and shining copper,
Trailing purple flames.
And inside,
The two lovers
Escaping to somewhere more real.
And if steampunk is yer thing, you may enjoy reading about the adventures of "the robot James Watt built", Tin Jimmy...
And if steampunk is yer thing, you may enjoy reading about the adventures of "the robot James Watt built", Tin Jimmy...
