I, ROBOT

I sing my body electric, state-of-the-art
luxury sports utility vehicle of the species
nothing like me ever was...
built like a brick shit house to last,
to take a licking and keep on ticking

modeled on the redundancy principle: extra
brain hemisphere, kidney, lung, eye, hand,
foot, and five senses to boot (each with its
software-bundled hardware connected by
spaghetti-tangles of fiber-optic nerves

to the mother of all boards) and every
cell vacuum-packed with its own spiro-
encrypted, double-helix blueprint,
and every digit stamped with
its own swirl-pattern ‘scan code’

Oh, I’m the quintessential
self-replicating
self-healing
self-cleaning
chemico-robotic

Circuit City wonder...
drop me on any alien planet and watch:
at one-tenth brain capacity, I’ll invent
the wheel, steal fire from the Titans, turn
the water into wine, clone myself, and

(when there’s enough
of me and enough time
and typewriters)
we... will compose...
Hamlet!