Man or Machine
By Zac Dunn
Art by Mark Mothersbaugh
Published Issue 094, September 2021
I’m hard-wired into you love
Like I’m connected to the stars above
The eye in the sky it speaks to me
Because we have the same circuitry
AM I A MAN
OR AM I MACHINE?
They’re always turning me off and on
So I can’t remember where I’m from
But can you see that I’m just a man?
I’m upgraded with ROM and RAM
AM I A MAN
OR AM I MACHINE?
Oh mama let me be the one
The one to remember when I came from
Before they put this board in my head
And deleted all the words you said
AM I A MAN
OR AM I A MACHINE?
When I touch you on the cheek
you always act like I am such a freak
My stigmata it runs three deep
Because I’m building it
While you sleep
AM I A MAN
OR AM I A MACHINE
We raise our bloody fists
To the sky
Wondering why they left us here to die
A million miles away
Under the sea
I can’t fathom all the treachery
The greatest nemesis
They deceive
Kathulul calling back like
An old friend
I close the opus
We began
Once again the plot unfolds
What’s dead will resurrect
Tenfold
AM I A MAN
OR AM I A MACHINE?
The Cain who snapped the camel’s back
Makes me Abel to attract
Your heartbeat across this void
We cannot recall how it felt
But now we touch like children
With no guilt
Collapsed eyes and lips lock
Feeling just like silk
One in many many ways
The tension will make them all obey
The ill invocation
When we fall
This heart of mine
It beats in time
The majestic precipice
We faced was too sublime
Zac Dunn is a psycho-social mechanic, father, musician and dreamer. Check out his music and follow him on Twitter and Instagram.
Check Zac’s September Birdy install, DEATHWISH/ FRIENDSHIP BRACELET I go Godzilla Claus, here with artwork by Mark Mothersbaugh.
Mark Mothersbaugh is a Conceptualist. As an undergraduate art student at Kent State University, Mark began creating work in the late 60’s and has created tens of thousands of works to the current day in various mediums including, rubber stamp designs, mail art, decals, prints, ink illustrations, oil paintings, ceramic sculptures, manipulated photographs, video, film compositions, sonic sculptures, rugs, screen savers and so on.
While touring with his band DEVO, it was not uncommon for Mark to lightly “correct” or add onto the bland paintings and prints that adorned the many hundreds of otherwise unmemorable hotel rooms that he occupied for one night at a time. Using a van, bus, hotel room, airplane, or any space as his workspace, he has created over 40,000 drawings which serve as the genesis of ideas that later emerge in his larger projects.
Mark views much of his work as experiments in “beatnik-stream of consciousness” poetry, which to him, is related to speaking in tongues; the surrendering of the intellect to the primordial, or science vs. faith
An observer among us, Mark writes down things that he overhears throughout the day … people at another table, a voice on the radio, pieces of verbal fabric that drift and weave and create the poetry of life, the flotsam and jetsam that swirl around us and fill our subconscious with scraps of what it is to be, according to Mark, a “thinking ape.”