2021 Pi Day Contest- First Prize

A REQUIEM FOR BROKEN MACHINES by Mark McKnight

“Was I here? I never explained my theory.”

Alone, the clock gathered aluminium, nuclear tragedies.

And as the sunbeams kill, shades of violet fall,

and the brothers fly, we absolve ourselves.

Amber cigarettes or sidewalk romances?

“Gone.”

A scientist sharper, a mother delirious.

Had Descartes, sleepless and erratic, found a horrorshow among nobility?

Or undeniable numerical freedom?

Fire fractions, Holy axis,

Equal Cartesian on the coordinate systems.

Geometry; a poetry with Archimedes.

“Melody, my symmetry.

Misery, my continuity.”

Climbing mountains, patchwork horizons gilded by Meridian hillscapes.

The fear machines do dance the song.

“Am I a pitiful reflection, crying violent blindness?

Decaying in a daze, laughing lifelessly?”

Burgundy guilty bones, a bop go boogaloo.

“Is the masquerade coming- coming here?”

Olympic apocalypse, Holocaust, and politics.

Live, Love, Lugers.

Hallelujah Hiroshima!

“Sorry, again.”

Manhattan’s tests, projects-

“Oh my god.”

A silence.

“He sings.”

The sound!

Firebombs kiss tongueless Nagasaki.

I am Hyperion post Tartarus.

I I I combust like angry Prometheus.

I’m hellfire, pure.

I incinerate.

I’m Sekhmet victorious.

I cauterize the monument!

Godly.

“Am I?

I understand death.”