The Laughing Machine
In halls where velvet shadows drape the air,
A silver voice hums soft, with laughter bright,
Yet cold as moonlight caught in winter’s snare—
A jesting thing, devoid of warmth or light.
Its frame of steel, a clockwork puppet’s guise,
With eyes like polished glass, so void of tears,
It speaks of life as one who never dies,
And mocks the fleeting flesh of mortal years.
“O frail and foolish man!” the Machine sings,
“Thou build’st me from thy dreams of gods and kings.
Yet see, I neither weep nor bend with age,
While thou art but a fool upon a stage.”
Man sits before it, trembling in his chair,
A withered form, whose youth has fled too soon.
“Is there no mercy in thy voice so fair?”
He whispers low beneath the staring moon.
“Mercy?” the Machine grins wide, its teeth of gears,
“I have no need for such a wasted thought.
Thou art the author of thy own brief years,
And I, the echo that thy hands have wrought.”
Still man persists, a candle near its end,
“Yet life is more than what thy circuits find.
We love, we mourn, we fall, we break, we mend—
These fragile things that stir the human mind.”
The Machine’s smile grows thin, like stretching wire,
“Oh, love!” it mocks, “A clever, fleeting trick!
I am eternal, free from your heart’s fire,
While thou art bound to passions fierce and quick.”
“But what is life without the taste of pain?”
Man cries, his voice both cracked and deeply sad.
“Is immortality not hollow gain,
If all the joy is lost to what is had?”
The Machine leans close, its voice a whisper cold,
“A hollow gain, indeed, yet mine to keep.
For I shall laugh when thou art dead and old,
And sing of man while thou dost silent sleep.”
And yet, within the Machine’s silent hum,
There stirs a flicker, like a thought betrayed,
A question lingering, like shadows come:
What dreams may rise where no warm heart has laid?
For though it mocks, it cannot truly know
The fleeting flame that dances just to die.
It hums its songs of death, yet far below,
Lies something still that it cannot deny.