Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Terrance Hayes’ "A. Machine" is a poem of movement, urgency, and existential uncertainty, framed within the metaphor of a high-speed drive toward an unknown destination. The poem operates within a landscape of mechanical velocity and spiritual inquiry, using the voice of a speaker who seems caught between past and future, between body and disappearance. The title itself suggests a merging of human and machine, as though the self has become an apparatus of motion, or a program running on the logic of acceleration and entropy.

From the outset, the speaker acknowledges his precarious position: "Hey, I am learning what it means to ride condemned." This line carries the weight of inevitability, suggesting that whatever path the speaker is on, it is one of predetermined failure or destruction. The following line, "I may be breaking up," reinforces the theme of fragmentation—not just physically, as one might imagine in a vehicle at dangerous speed, but also emotionally and existentially. The phrase "doing 85 outside the kingdom / Of heaven" further complicates the imagery, placing the speaker in a liminal space between divinity and destruction. Speed becomes both an act of defiance and an emblem of fate: the faster one moves, the closer one gets to transcendence—or to oblivion.

The poem thrives on wordplay and repetition, particularly in lines like "The past is over and I'm over the past." The doubling here suggests both acceptance and exhaustion, as if the speaker has resigned himself to leaving history behind but cannot help but acknowledge its weight. The broken odometer—"My odometer / Is broken, can you help me?"—serves as a critical image, emphasizing the speaker’s disconnection from time and distance. He is in motion but lacks a clear measurement of progress, lost in a journey without markers or conclusions.

The enjambment and fractured syntax contribute to the poem’s sense of instability. Lines bleed into one another, mirroring the rush of thought and movement: "When you get this mess- / Age, I may be a half-ton crush, a half tone of mist / And mystery." Here, Hayes plays with the word "message," breaking it into "mess-age," suggesting both a transmission and a chaotic era. The speaker’s fate is uncertain—he may be reduced to a wreck ("half-ton crush") or transformed into something incorporeal ("a half tone of mist and mystery"). This tension between solidity and dissolution recurs throughout the poem, reinforcing the speaker’s anxiety over what remains when the body is gone.

The metaphorical layering continues as the speaker envisions himself as "trooper bait with the ambulance / Ambling somewhere, or a dial of holy stations, a band- / Age of clamor and spooling, a dash and semaphore." The imagery here oscillates between the mechanical and the divine. The reference to "holy stations" evokes the Catholic Stations of the Cross, suggesting a journey toward suffering and redemption, while "a bandage of clamor and spooling" plays on "bandage" as both a wound covering and a radio band, where noise and communication intertwine. The "dash and semaphore" further emphasize this breakdown of language and meaning, as dashes in Morse code and semaphores in maritime signaling systems both serve as forms of fragmented, urgent communication.

The latter half of the poem pushes further into uncertainty and impending crisis: "I am alive skidding on the tongue," a line that suggests both physical peril (skidding on the road) and linguistic failure (the inability to fully articulate one’s existence). The poem ends on a hauntingly intimate note: "When you get this message, will you sigh, My lover is gone?" The second-person address personalizes the chaos, shifting from abstract existentialism to direct human connection. The final question lingers as an open-ended plea—will anyone mourn the speaker’s disappearance? Will his motion, once ceased, leave an absence that is felt?

"A. Machine" is a poem of speed and fragmentation, capturing the frantic energy of a world in flux while interrogating deeper concerns of mortality and communication. Hayes fuses the mechanical with the spiritual, the bodily with the abstract, constructing a vision of a self hurtling toward an unknown fate. The poem reads like a transmission from a moment of crisis, an SOS from someone caught between survival and disappearance, asking whether his voice—his message—will endure beyond the wreckage.

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