The Twittering Machine by Linda Eve Diamond

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The Twittering Machine
by Linda Eve Diamond

- after “The Twittering Machine” by Paul Klee (1922)

Not since Father Time and Mother Nature
invested in a mom-and-pop shop
 
employing watch and bird makers 	
to hatch the cuckoo clock

have we had such a fine-feathered invention
as the twittering machine—a mastery at last

of nature and machinery, of man-made
natural beauty, harnessing the birdsongs

churning them out, each modified by
the whirling worlds of spin they’re in

edgy, wired, spring loaded 
in keeping with the times

wound up and spun by cranks 
and twitter machine operators

who now run an online world-wide
human-sized twittering machine—

of people tied to the lines through spins
and twists as it cranks views and moods

altering the songs of the people on the wire
and the discordant disharmonies of the choir

as the spit takes spin and no one remembers
the old ways of being or feeling or 

what the birds sounded like 
before.

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