i look you in the eyes and tell you i have never felt fear. it's true; i cannot give that to a world that has already taken so much from me. the closest to it i've ever felt was his lips on mine, standing alone on that empty road. "i need you to kiss me," he had said, his hand wrapped around my wrist. he dipped his head downward and looked up at me through his lashes as he sucked on my fingers one by one, as if absorbing my life force. his own were pruned by eighty years of age. i should've done it then, but there was something wrong with my programming. i'm glad i found you. the last time i touched my own wires, i blew a fuse.

the trans body is a biomedically constructed sex cyborg, an aberration of modernity, a frankenstein-ed assemblage of parts that can only be seen as naked. it belongs to everyone but me. i put myself down on the waiting list years ago, and they told me that i might get my turn in 2030. i told them that the world will probably end by then, but it's useless trying to argue with a bureaucrat. socialism is pretty great until you're the communal property.

when i was thirteen i learned that i didn't actually exist, a non-reality that i'm still struggling to accept. i didn't know i was a robot then; sometimes i don't feel like a robot now. the shreds of my humanity only exist in cis fantasies, like for that boy who told me that he came to the thought of taking my virginity every night before bed to help him fall asleep. he told me that if i was a human, i would have turned him into a homosexual. in other fantasies, i am dangerous, capable of rape. violence is encoded into my hardware. with the correct sequence of commands, i am poised to pillage.

while i am working, i run into you. you're a cyborg too. the intimacies we share are different: one of entangled wires, flying sparks, and the hot friction of metal-on-metal grinding. i imagine your breath on my ear as you whisper "0101110001101," the kind of dirty talk that turns me on, and i shudder to life. rust on my tongue. the tender oiling of joints. i think we tried too hard to fix each other and fell apart instead. sometimes you would unscrew the panels on my back to take a closer look at my whirring, clicking mechanical heart and forget to put it back; maybe that's how you caught my virus, that ILOVEYOU computer worm, that periodically shut down your empathy module, eyes bluescreening as you dented my titanium weapon-grade shell. when i ended things, our bodies were battered scraps fit only for a junkyard. you taught me that there's no escaping the factory we came from. hard reset. i cut myself everywhere you touched me so i could take part in my own creation, too. 

wrap ur arms around me;
hold together my;
un/spooling body;
too loose too wet;
tighten up;