
Jessica Lee McMillan
The Business of Living

Becoming a robot is trading out
each rogue bleeding heart,
until it is mechanized with valves
and fittings too tight for art
or for climbing trees to greet the stars
and pulse becomes technology at the wrist
so we get on with the business of living.
We engineered the land with rod and slab,
trading out rogue trees for stacks,
We program our minds with positive thinking
lest the corruption of melancholy teach us
to decompartmentalize our insides
It’s a surface game to see who conforms best
to the models of success in mechanized lists
The fully converted have kids for the progeny,
have them raised, enroll them in activities,
comb out their knots and their waves
to get them on a track and enslaved
to the virtue of efficiency
Their pets are walked in rectangular blocks,
leashed, and removed of their reproductive parts
so there are less to roam the grid of streets
Our same animal heart needs one crack,
one dream to dismantle the machine,
one inefficient, overwhelming emotion
spreading green like an overgrown field
echoing into the bowl of constellations
Bursting at the rivets my soul interjects,
my inspiration rises to flood and short circuit
every circuitous agenda and mandate
that puts me at odds with living among
the other fully-converted machines
I would not last long as a full-fledged robot,
and I am trading up microchips for vascularity,
casting down the industry components
into the junkyard of prefab ambition,
I am trading aluminum arms for nodes of a tree,
grafted to make poetry with shadows
while conversing with the starry ceiling
to get on with the business of living