Tech’s Lament

Time-travel techs bust their humps
for people who are horses’ rumps.
What would these haughty Ph.D.s
do without us ants and bees
pushing buttons, pulling levers,
working round the clock like beavers?
We can send them back through Time,
we can stop them on a dime.
We would have these stuffed degrees
ask us nicely, “If you please?”
but they get the fame and cash,
while we techs just haul the trash.

Steven Utley is the author of two collections of verse issued by Anamnesis Press, This Impatient Ape (1998) and Career Moves of the Gods (2000). He’s also the author of three story collections, Ghost Seas (1997), The Beasts of Love (to be published in late 2004 by Wheatland Press), and Where or When (forthcoming from PS Publishing in the UK), and, as well, of the perennially soon-to-be-finished Silurian Tales, comprising a couple of dozen loosely connected stories originally published in Asimov's, F&SF, Sci Fiction, etc.

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