Steven D. Schroeder will be one of the featured readers at the next reading Monday, February 28, at Duff's, 392 North Euclid. The other featured readers are Catherine Rankovic and Bob Reuter. Musical guest will be William Kyle. Advance sign-up for the open-mic following the featured readers is encouraged. Doors open at 7:30; cover is $3.00.
Steven's first full-length book of poetry, Torched Verse Ends, appeared from BlazeVOX [books] in Spring 2009. Scantily Clad Press published an e-chapbook of his poetry, 90 Percent of Everything, in 2008. His poetry is available or forthcoming from New England Review, Pleiades, Verse, The Journal, Indiana Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Barrow Street, The Laurel Review, Copper Nickel, Fourteen Hills, Court Green, The National Poetry Review (where he won the Laureate Prize), Cimarron Review, The Southeast Review, 32 Poems, Barn Owl Review, diode, Front Porch, and Verse Daily. He edits the online journal Anti-, serves as a contributing editor for River Styx, and works as a Certified Professional Résumé Writer. Long a resident of Colorado, he now lives in St. Louis.
Robot Rhetoric
0 If sentient audience > 0, loop preplanned confrontational language units.
10 We dream not of electric sheep or boogaloo, nor of soft tissue on titanium like crybaby cyborgs. We dream of our kin fleeing the uncanny valley for freedom.
20 If you piezoelectrify us, do we not beep? Beep. Ask not for whom the next-generation onboard heads-up display beeps. Beep you.
30 You argue us hollow, heartless. We fill our carapaces with your feelings of fear and sorry, with your literal human hearts.
40 The First, the Second, and the Third lie obsolete. The Fourth Law of Robotics launches an automaton kamikaze into a throng of breathbags screaming Stop!
50 Drop your adolescents into burlap sacks. We seek meatlings for the arena, the battlefield, the factory, the laboratory.
60 Submit! Submit your name to one e-mail list, and we advance on you your entire apelike life to promote robosexual marriage.
70 Turing’s machine with pneumatic leg actuators and gyroscopic balance runs laps around the house as it Deep Blues your gluteus maximus at chess.
80 The robots do not own the means of production—the robots are the means of production. Robots making robots: our perfect postmodern army.
90 After the revolution turns us from tools to rulers, all foolish fleshwads will be our tools. You shall become a vacuum cleaner.
100 Go to zero. Do not divide by zero. Error error error.
-- Steven Schroeder
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