Sonnet: The Vampires of Light Ahead
by John Kendall Hawkins
I had never heard such sounds come from anything human.
- Octavia Butler, "Blood Child" (1984)
Monsters of empathy are among us,
honey pots of horror who lure with cries
of desolation and woe, but their eyes
are cold and their tears like ice. They wrong us
by stealing the fire in our hearts for good
works, leveraging our love as weakness,
see us as jail fish, long to make a mess
of all the laws we thought we understood.
These beasts are coming out of the closet,
now that the new darkest age is ahead,
when we become half-alive and half-dead,
hosts for an AI blood child deposit.
I've seen such darkness, the sum of all fear,
in the vast emptiness everywhere.
