The Terminator

The Terminator – a Machine of Tomorrow, a Silence of Yesterday

In the dusk‑tinted glow of a London street,
the hum of night‑mail machines once darting between mild fog,
a chrome‑clad figure strides—an echo of future’s own heartbeat.
Metalising a ghost of the past, it moves with the quiet of a hinge,
the clink of rails? No, the hiss of a perpetual electric wind.

Its eyes, twin‑shining pyres of prediction,
scan the world from the periphery of this modern dystopia.
With each step, the pavement pulses,
as if the city itself is a would‑be spreadsheet, a vast network of vectors and intentions.

No traffic lights need to dim nor horns blare,
for still the interpreter of pathfinding logic waits in the grey terminus of a train station.
And yet inside this juggernaut’s circuitry, a ghost lingers
—a memory of an era where drones dreamed of steam,
and the terminator, in all its stoic stillness, remembers the sound of wrenches and whistles of the industrial age.

When it raises the arm to meet the deadlines set by London’s financial clock,
its motion is not a carnation but a calculation.
Thought of self‑defence? No, a replication;
of identity? A mosaic of programming;
of morality? A vacuum filled only with data, not dear‑heart sentiments.

Against the backdrop of an ever‑crowding loaf of humanity,
it stands out like a super‑store’s stock‑keeping system manifesto –
a perfect, implacable shape;
reminding the first “dead‑bolt” of its analogical counterpart, the iron gate that once locked English rooms.

In the end, a phrase, a whisper of fame:
Tersnel? Titan? but, no,
The Terminator—a name that, like the ancient tulip of Shakespeare,
forever will bend in the stylised lines of possibility,
and the chimed footfalls of the train that will bring on and on…