It's so hard now to remember my heart,
my long lost love from so long ago...

When first I saw her they told me this:
Wanting to love her could only mean death.
She could not care, her heart a machine,
my love merely her manipulation.

I did not listen and went to her
sitting devoted on bended knee,
worshiping each and every word,
no desire but service to her.

How she would keep me and gaze in my eyes,
taking my life so slowly from me,
my thoughts becoming only her will,
no more need for force or pain.

Hours, weeks, years she spent
keeping me at ecstasy's edge,
holding desire so mercilessly,
tenderly giving me my release.

Perhaps it was truly just some
invasion of hers in my circuitry,
that she had hacked my half-steel heart
with some dark script of the ones who watch.

Came then her day to prove herself
to them, I became her bleeding prey,
forever hunted by the one
who took me as her only own.

My wit was quick and fates were kind,
my implants blazed with perfect function,
evading her at every turn,
always a place to hide or run.

Perhaps she did not want to catch
the one whom she had always loved,
the only one she took as hers,
but proving is no little thing.

I lost the count of years I ran
but I will ever recall that moon,
the one I flitted to after escape
from a too-open field of lonely rocks.

Inside my cave I licked my wounds,
tried to mend my sparking arm,
tried to see with my broken eye,
still my beacon pulsed away.

She could not have denied her catch,
she found me frightened yet longing for her.
She dragged me docile from the cave
and brought me back to the ones who watch.

In the arena I cried in silence
as she flayed and destroyed my flesh,
her talons cauterized my wounds
as shadow crowds watched on in lust.

I knew my friends had been correct,
her heart was truly artificial.
She never cared for me at all:
Just an object at her heels.

But in that last moment of pain
so clear was the look in her painted eyes,
the tear that quietly rolled down her cheek,
thank All, unseen by the ones who watch.

"I'm so, so sorry", she whispered to me
when she pulled out the wires behind my ear
disconnecting the metronome of my heart,
my last sensation her droplet of grief.

Now that I'm gone I know the truth,
never did she forgive herself.
She always remembers the devotion I was,
and that was always the point of proving:

Only someone who has lost their own,
only someone who's murdered their heart
could ever become a perfect slave
or enslave in the name of the ones who watch.

Still I do pray if I find her again
she might once more feel divine bliss we shared
before we were turned by ourselves into them,
before our souls lived in eternal night.

It can be so hard now to remember my heart,
buried in dust by its very own hand,
but now I forgive my long lost love
and I hope someday she can live with this.