In the continuing series for my eldest daughter, a poem for The Twilight Zone, Season 2, Episode 4:

A Thing About Machines
by Michael Romani

A practicing sophisticate; writer of precious things
There is a tart sophistry to all that he brings
He has no interests outside of current annoyances
And to vent his wrath on mechanical contrivances
A malcontent born into an age that he abhors
Too late or too early born in the century for his mores

B Finchley arrives home seemingly in grand style
Moronic small talk he calls it through a sardonic smile
Pushing his foot through a TV screen might not solve it
But, it is his, no matter how he involves it
Grand larceny at the hands of extortionist repairmen
Who keep coming at him with charges again and again

The repairman tries to explain and be understood
To obtain good in this world he must do good
For all of his advice, the repairman is told he forgettable
In another moment of disenchanting words most regrettable 
Screaming to himself and still unable to stop time
The man's hate for the mechanical is loathsome and sublime

Often and endlessly, he rails at the insubordination 
All the efforts of others, machines and their coordination
His assistant believes he needs a three armed alligator
In an allegory of spent feelings dispensed later
No longer willing to be bullied by the violator
Who tries to change his tune from being her annihilator 

The thought of being along is worse than intolerable
He asks her to stay for as long as she is able
The machines he claims are conspiring into rebellion
Each of them acting like little rotten hellions
A twentieth century panacea is found in medicine
But, it's not for mean like him; not now and not then

To B. Finchley, this is no shade of nor big mystery
All of his machinery is acting in concerted conspiracy
She tells him straight up, the are not but illusions
That in her opinion, he needs help on his mental confusion
As she flees, she wishes him ill and brashly slams the door
Just then, the typewriter decides on a few lines more

A few lines of scrawl from the core of the conspiracy
Warning him, "Get out of here Finchley!!"
Sweating profusely over the words of a mechanical device
He is determined to stand firm against its advice
A flamenco dancer on the TV screen joins the conspiracy
Imploring "Why don't you get out of here, Finchley?"

One man against the machines' mad conspiracy
Finchley defies this morose cacophony
Seeking out in desperation for some human company
But, again and again, he finds no sympathy
The angrier he gets, the more he finds life empty
Just another disgruntled bachelor living life lonely

Finding his life filled with incident after incident
He begins to find even the witnesses a bit improvident
Disinclined to this moment's moment a proper think
Instead, he turns to a night of drink after drink
Falling asleep on a stupor on his chaise couch
He awakes to the mental clatter of a drunken slouch

Louder and louder and without mercy
He is drowned in a chorus of "(G)et out of here, Finchley"
Shaken to a tremble, he blows it and loses his cool
Irate, he uses a chair to take the TV to school
With a shattered screen, it goes up on smoke
As Finchley backs out of the room, fit to choke

Chased down the stairs and out of his house
He has become as frightened as a mouse
Fleeing as his car seems determined to run him down
In a concerted effort, he is chased about town
Pushed by his fear into the depths of the pool
A victim of comeuppance by the Golden Rule

Another cheery bon voyage from the Twilight Zone
It becomes a moment of wit as sharp as his own
Words cut deep, sometimes sharp as a knife
An openly held secret of this thing called life
Where truth is to fiction as awake is to dreams
And where kindness goes a long way, even for machines

(c) February 5, 2018  Michael Romani
All Rights Reserved