08/18/2002
This poem really deserves some explanation. In retrospect, it's not very easy reading, and I apologize. However, it really does accomplish what I was planning. To clear things up first, the speaker in the first and third stanzas is an android, written in an almost stream of consciousness style of writing. The second stanza's speaker is me, the poet, describing the android. The speaker's identity is obfuscated intentionally, thus the "we." Besides the last few lines, the rest of the poem is meant to sound very "cold" and emotionless. Basically, the poem is about a robotic man's struggle to feel emotion. He tries everything he can to feel emotion, including pursuing art and religion (see stanza two). The only emotion that he can ever feel is a yearning for emotion.