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(based on Aldous Huxley's book "Brave New World")

Human hatchery

Clink clink clink clink...
Test tubes prattling past
along the chrome plated production line.
Glistening under fake fluorescence
humming in harmony
with the magnetic motors
of conveyors, centrifuges and camshafts.
Biological blobs of gamete goo,
vials of vile biology,
a tempest of sperm and ova,
neatly confined to a pyrex womb.
Organised, sanitised, harmonised.
Fordist fertilisation.
All equal under Ford.

Or at least until your fate and fortune 
are forced and fixed at forty metres.
Not nature (abhorrent), 
not nurture (disgusting),
not what you know,
not who you know,
but the viability of your cell.
Destiny by DNA.
What will you be?
An Alpha Aryan?
A Gamma gopher?
A mass produced Epsilon?
Will you be genetically enhanced?
Or poisoned and asphyxiated?

Perhaps you'll be discarded
as excess bio-matter
by the second trimester
at ninety metres?

Or survive to be hatched
at one fifty metres?
Neatly sown along furrows
of sterile steel cots.
Rows and columns,
ranks and files,
levels and floors
of battery babies.
Chemically conditioned,
weaned on sleep whispering,
embracing their place in a perfect society.
United by soma!
(a gram is better than a damn)
Disease designed away!
All praise Ford!
Everyone is happy!

But nothing is perfect.
Bernard is cursed.
Excess embryonic alcohol
injected at one twenty metres.
Someone wasn't paying attention.
Industrial accident.
Disruptive misfit.
Unhappiness.

Beta's hypnopedic haikus

Alphas lead the way
Grey matter, grey uniform
Alphas rule wisely

Betas work less hard
Mulberry clad skilled workers
Glad I'm a Beta

Gammas are stupid
Wearing green! Ugly as trees!
Ignore the Gammas

Deltas are dummies
Khaki clones, oxygen starved
Bokanovsky batch

Epsilon primates
Brutish, black robed underclass
Disposable drones

John's suicide soliloquy

To be or not to be?
I cannot be.
So I decide not to be.

How can I be noble and suffer
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
when the arrows have been broken
and the slings put aside
by this ugly utopia?

Should I shuffle off this mortal coil
and enter the eternal sleep
perchance to dream without soma?
Will I enter paradise
paid for many fold
with barb wire and thorns,
with torments and trials,
with utter utter heartbreaking longing?
What sense does this make
when paradise lies at my feet
that I've not suffered enough to deserve?

How can I earn the love
of the woman I love
when she gives her love so freely
to myself and others who scantly earn
the meerest slither of her golden fruit?
Love so sweet to the lips
but diluted by banality and promiscuity
to the tasteless sterility of boiled water.
Yet I still yearn.

And when I attain my unimagined dream
I reject her with anger 
and sow the seeds of confusion
in her innocent eyes
and watch the weeds of fear
choke her very essence.
What demons have hatched from my soul?
What has this world manufactured in my heart?

And so I seek solace in solitude.
A lonely lighthouse keeper
in a stormless sea of soma civilisation.
Absolution with abject poverty,
the stings of self flagellation
barely noticed against my rented heart.
The madness of mixed up mantras.

Yet retribution comes from a hornet's nest
of helicopters carrying the inane.
Spectators of the spectacle.
Curious about the curiosity.
Fascination with the forbidden.
Cultures sparking across electrodes.
Moths drawn to taboo's acetylene flame.
I curse them! I curse them all!

I was born savage, then made savage.
Marooned on Prospero's isle
by insanity's tempest.
I can brew and boil 
and billow and burn
and cast down purifying bolts against the outside world.
One asylum to another.
Never knowing peace.
O brave new world, that has such people in it.
But this world is not for me.



Notes:

BNW society is divided into five major classes. From highest to lowest: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon

Original BNW quote - sleep conditioning for Betas - "Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."

Bokanovsky is a fictional process of human cloning - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokanovsky%27s_Process

Hypnopedia is the process of sleep learning - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep-learning

Gametes are cells used in reproduction (sperm and ova) - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamete

Soma is a drug mass produced by the BNW government - citizens are sleep conditioned to become addicted

"a gram is better than a damn" is a BNW mantra used by its citizens to encourage non-conformists (i.e. are unhappy) to take soma

John was a savage rescued from a reservation by Bernard Marx for his own political agenda. 

Bernard Marx was a physically and mentally imperfect Alpha misfit reportedly caused by excess alcohol injected into his embryo during his hatching.

John's soliloquy is a parody of Shakespeare's "to be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet. Since John learnt to read from an old copy of Shakespeare's works, this seemed appropriate.

In BNW, Henry Ford is revered as a god - the Christian cross is replaced with a T (as in the model T Ford, an early affordable mass produced car).



Written 10th April 2017
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