Robot babies

Dare I listen to the musicks?

* * *

I want to defile the bond of our sacred oath by lining up the men of the world -- sure, by height -- and touching the eyebrows of each in turn. You have seen how I study the bone structures of strangers.

* * *

What murders would I commit? Of cul-de-sacs of grass and pine trees? There has been a religion of procreation -- and the reason I am here, of course. What creature would I have been if the result of a careful and desperate decision?

* * *

Other robot babies have felt this discomfort.

* * *

Love, will you burn with me in the beachen bonfires? Our way has never been the festivity of holiday sweaters. We can scarcely hold hands on a park bench. [You need not be part of my artifice. I rally against my species while you are naturally alien.] People and pets, people and pets, while beach grasses anchor themselves in the Always-Before.

* * *

Even as I contemplate my homeworld, I am drawn to the mermen emerging on exhausted bowlegs.

"No, no," he said. "For heaven's sake don't take it off. You are all bloated pork without it."

"You'll have me buried in this thing, won't you?"

"I'll have you put to sea."

"What will you do without me?"

"Oh, you're not taking it with you. I'll find new pork for it."

"Incorrigible."

But such was the magnetism of his fiction that the mermen kept coming.