I don’t know how to put this into words.

Words were never easy, slippery things with too many faces

All smiles and eyes and heaving breaths

Some would say too human for a mind like mine.

Each cry for help is met with a reminder

That instead of blood, I click with gears

Stared at, so alien,

My oily flesh and oily heart

Words spoken in code, I am told I have a wrench for a tongue.

Better a wrench for a tongue than for a fist, right?

Even in jest

I am never told my tongue is a dancer.

Never eloquent, never sickly sweet

As the honey-tipped barbs spoken behind my back,

I am told I have no spine.

I am all exoskeleton,

Yet another reminder

To them I am not human.

I should be more than that, shouldn’t I?

For human is just a word

And words are simply spoken

Never beaten into people to make solutions

Of problems I am told never did exist.

I wish I knew how people tick.

They tell me I am the one with gears

The one with oil-hearts and a swollen-stone mind

Rigid in its checkerboard simplicity.

I am told I am not justice

For justice is blind, and I,

I see too much.

For clockwork eyes see time clearly

Instead of eyes of flesh and blood

Who see the world through water.

I would ask how one could see

If one were drowning

How they would breathe in the night sky

Without metal lungs

Wings for hair, and hardened tongues.

I am told I am not beautiful.

No machine is deemed a masterpiece for clicking along

To an industrial, immortalised tempo.

I wish to dance

But metal, however rigid it may be

Makes my legs unstable.

If I have an oily heart, how can I love?

They laugh and tell me I am wrong

Delusional, as a stone-minded man must be

For I am not a man, and I must not love

For then I am not machine.

I don’t know how to put this into words,

For words are simple, hard and jaded

Pawns, actors on a stage of black and white.

They tell me I am not right, but they,

They have never spoken with metal lungs

They have never seen the dreams

Of a heartless man

I say they have heard the clicking

Of a wrench-less tongue.