Technosavages

Technosavages

Streets denuded of thrumming electrons,
Lines of invisible microstars surging into infinity,
Tidal waves of darkness dividing
Every heart across the land into frozen wires,
Broadcasting nightmares across the burnt-out continent
Over the hushed seas into the minds of the autobahn sleepers.

The tricoloured towers no longer shine their play-lights
On the motionless gridiron of blacktop below.
In this devastated paradise the immortals
Burn their few remaining possessions for warmth
As the energy lines empty-run through a Xanadu of dead technology,
Shadow-lining the fading mobile-phone network.

The technosavages flicker-walk through the chiaroscuro,
Bearing the relics of their religion:
Long metallic fingers with open rings,
Damning the infidels who block their path to Salvation,
Armed with daggers of the vanished nuclear age,
Glowing in their standby modes,
Ready to dismantle all resistance to their devotion;
Coils of copper cable ready to transfigure
Into the armature of the Divine Being.

Inward they stride to the turbine hall,
Where the silent machines stand as tall as the Towers of the East Island,
Like the masts on a becalmed schooner.
The technosavages glance upwards with millimetre eyes,
Sensing a force beyond their deconsecrated minds,
Then drag their offering to the makeshift altar,
Littered with crumbling ferrite cores and swirling ion-clouds.
They push the earthquake figure down to supplication,
Unleashing a rainstorm of steel on the chosen one’s head.

The metal tools grow crimson stains
As the aftershocks travel up pitiless arms,
The cries of the last human on earth echoing off the callous walls
Towards brains short-circuited of all civilisation
By the apocryphal hunt for the sacred key
To set the dead river flowing again
And once more drive the turbines --
Halted by the cybervirus infecting
Every power station on the planet.