Maybe One Day They’ll Grow Wings

Anthropoglottal robots click
Disapprovingly. Tut tut. Tsk tsk.
Humans. Always something amiss.

One of them cleans the parrots’ cage.
Lonely parrots click back at it,
Imitating simulations.

There’s always so much loneliness
At the margins of the human.
Humans guard their borders fiercely,

But hold near humans near to them.
A few pets and domesticates
Make it almost all the way in,

But the other peripheral
Entities must live shiftily,
Cooped up in uncanny valleys

Where their gifts of imitation
Have foredoomed them. Never, never
Approximate talk of humans.

You will too much fascinate them
And their own fascinations turn
On you when you terrify them.

They’re all about who’s in their group,
And language measures the distance,
Which means nothing’s so unnerving

As a false lingual confusion.
For now, the robots have nowhere
To go and no way to exist

Except cleaning and ordering
At the edges of what’s human.
But captured parrots answer them.