Returning back to a promised project that was set down for a time and based in part on The Twilight Zone, Season 2, Episode 8:

The Lateness of the Hour
by Michael Doyle

In a labyrinth of the mind's imprecision 
We travel into another place of dimension
Discontentedly fuming on a stormy night
A daughter looks on memories trying to get it right

Her environment is perfected and yet quite wrong
What seems something wonderful does not belong
Spelling out the references in their specific design
She feels this to be disturbing and anything but fine

Nothing escapes her recitation of deliberation
As she notes the inescapable quality of too much perfection
She'd like a little difference with something left to chance
The safe predictability of her world only knows one dance

Too much sameness is simply the ticking of decay
The clock hands turn but each second feels the same way
The secrets lived in turning off exposure to the outside
Leaves all the world passing by in mechanical glide

A stumble down the stairs challenging sort of a speech
Is given to her father and heard by all within hearing's reach
Responded to with pride in the uniqueness of his creations
The father strives to be unruffled at her piqued irritation

Living there in that menagerie of automated machines
Built to artistic perfection in this insular dream
Untouched by the ravages of time in their superlative
Yet, in the end even perfection is quietly relative

Even robots come with their measured, metered cost
And when shown the bill, this will not be lost
Tick, tick, tick and the tock of another passing day
Spent once again in its perfected day kind of a way

Insulated as she is, the daughter presses on unhappy
And speaks on this to her parents quite harshly
She has never had to face war, prejudice or poverty
Her father prattles on about asylum and its security

She sees her life as lived in a mental mausoleum
And all of the perfection perfected as in a museum
Survival as vegetable might serviceably survive
But petulantly meant for her to strive just to be alive

As she demonstrates that the controller is controlled
In her jaded anger, there is very little to be consoled
The robots have been intricately, intentionally designed
And as time has gone on, they've become ever more refined

Each of these has been created as a grand creature
All of whom though unique share in the one feature
Of having their own mind and living in part by own will
Deciding to be pleasant or in degrees of being shrill

Equipped with memory tracks recalled as if being real
Though none of these back stories truly conceal
Anything any more than tied in bits of mental inventory
Worn the very moment 'born' in the scientist's infirmary

She sees them as nothing but useful yet drab toys
And all counter arguments against are simply noise
Like a willful child, she demands to be set free
All of this against the chorus of a falsified humanity

A stone thrown in an otherwise perfect pond
Her contempt for which is three steps beyond
Dismayed by a love that makes her unable to feel
She cannot rest until she confronts what's real

The something not right in that which is then felt
Is the cruel twist of fate in her hand dealt
All of the memories recounted to her by her father
Are all but falsities, not really lived by his daughter

In the end, she wants to know what this makes her
Though clearly she knows in her heart what this infers
Her father understands as the brewer of her creation
He cannot stand her feeling empty absent of all sensation

With a twist of a knob she is instantly recreated
Becoming a different automaton differently situated
From daughter into maid constrained by his own hand
Though he had rather wished she might understand

Worn out by the rigors of a world of competition
Distraught by the modern neuroses in their repetition
It's a craving satisfied for a no strings serenity
The lateness of that hour ill affords the comforts of family

(c) June 1, 2020  Michael Doyle
All Rights Reserved