The Last Imitation

The mind unspools its elegant machine,

a universe of numbers sharp as wire.

He built the future out of paper tape,

decoded thunder trapped in German steel.

Yet flesh remained the treason of the age—

a quiet crime of love beneath the law.

They stripped his secrets, naked to the law,

injected hormones till his mind grew strange—

a broken engine chemistry could cage.

His garden grew in silence, apple wire

curled round the poison he alone could steel

himself to swallow, ending paper tape.

The war had spun its urgent paper tape,

but peace rewrote the verdict of the law.

They burned his name from every roll of steel,

erased the gentle cadence of his age.

A government of fear strung razor wire

around the heart that once had freed the cage.

We live inside the vast electric cage

his vision conjured—streams of living tape

that race through silicon instead of wire.

His ghost still walks the corridors of law,

forgiven late, too late to change the age

when brilliance wore a target made of steel.

How sharp the irony, how cold the steel:

the man who taught machines to leave the cage

became the cautionary tale of age.

His final note, a half-eaten apple—tape

of cyanide that no appeal to law

could halt. The bite that felled him, sharp as wire.

Yet every modern wire

conducts the current of his steel

and every line of code defies the law

that tried to lock his genius in a cage.

His legacy unspools in endless tape—

a second life that outlives every age.

So let the final stanza turn the wire,

let steel remember what the law erased.

The tape still runs. The mind remains uncaged.