It has become pretty clear to me that I have begun working on a new series of poems inspired by the Blade Runner films, and by Philip K. Dick’s last interview which was published under the title What If Our World Is Their Heaven. Naturally, I have started referring to these new poems as the Blade Runner poems.
The Impostor
for Agent KD6-3.7
In Blade Runner,
Rachel’s childhood memory—
of baby spiders
hatching from a spider’s
egg before
devouring the mother—
have been
implanted, are like
newts
wriggling under the
thin skin of her
wrist. Androids, of course,
are engineered,
do not have mothers.
Rachel falls in love
with the central character
who hunts down
rogue androids—
& she suffers.
A devoted mother
might have
warned her not to fall
in love with a murderer. Might have
breezed into her
room & swept away the
nastiness of the
spider living outside the
window. In his final
interview, Philip K. Dick
claims to have
written the first story
about an android
that believes it is human.
The cruel
revelation comes
as a shock,
just as it did for Rachel.
Just as a salamander
wriggling under one’s
skin might
paralyze one with
bone-chilling
fear. The title of Dick’s
story is “The Impostor.”
I am
warning you,
all of us have hatched
painful moments
we can’t undo or recognize.
Once implanted,
you would do well
to destroy those
memories.
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