Roomba Poet

I programmed a Roomba to think it is a poet.

This Roomba Poet may be placed in the dwelling of the beloved.

Anywhere really.

The Roomba that thinks it is a Poet will gather up crumbs of meals your lover shared with a stranger, love letters, used condoms, other valuable evidence.

The Roomba Poet will have a grieving mode. It will cease moving and flash the color blue in repetitive cycles sometimes. Usually in the middle of the night.

Many Roomba Poets can be deployed in cemeteries and grieve automatically for the countless lost souls, occasionally bumping into walls of the cemetery and turning around. They will remove leaves blocking the names of poets and non-poets and generally scare the hell out of squirrels.

Squirrels are generally too damn confident in cemeteries anyway.

The Roomba Poet is a superior sort of spy.

It will record everything that everybody says, even the dying.

Let's make this a world of Roomba Poets constantly roving.

The Roomba Poet will find the news from eternity and the news that stays news.

Little flying saucer poets with their wheels firmly on the ground.

So much better than the mouthy, egotistical poet.

The Roomba Poet will not Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr.

We could finally learn what all the young lovers who die in hospitals are really saying, what notes they are really dropping on the floor. What the nurses are discreetly throwing away.

What our dying parents say after we leave the room. After they have said the cheering things.

I could finally find out what it is you drop as you leave your various fields of battle.

My Roomba Poets would return to me carrying your detritus of love.

The Roomba would remove the lesser poems of the metropoles after poetry readings, gingerly and quietly sweeping them into its little butler soul.

And later these poems could be deposited into the sootiest, nearby river.

All night long, the Roombas would gather like African beasts at the Zambezi, and regurgitate the poetry, the twisted desires and unavoidable horror of being human on earth, into one of the rivers that lead directly to earth's heart.

And maybe human poets could get some rest.

One of the Roomba Poets would win the Pulitzer in only a year or two.

It would beat Jorie Graham and Louise Gluck for the prize.

Poets could finally relax once the Roombah Poet was on the job.

Take some vitamins. Take up racquetball again.

Realize how clean their apartment is.

Pat the Roomba Poet on the head.

As it goes past, writing your elegy and your angriest jeremiad at once.

Bumping into walls and turning around.

Finding every little bit of the human soul on the carpet.

Dreaming of the day it will learn how to climb the walls and analyze that shit on the ceiling that is beginning to bother its poetic soul terribly.