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Dan Sklar is a professor of Creative Writing at Endicott College.

BLADE RUNNER

In the dystopia it is foggy, dark, raining, and polluted air.
Lights and smokestacks with fires, artificial owls, snakes,
and robots, called replicants, who look and act exactly
like humans, and do not know they are robots.
There are pipes and tubes and flying cars,
giant billboard screens, neon signs, monitors, televisions,
cameras everywhere. Venetian blind shadows.
“I’m going to ask you a few simple questions.”
Water dripping from faucets, drains, gutters, & pipes leaking.
Flashing lights, smoke, echo sounds from other rooms,
machines grinding, and it’s raining. Old bicycles.
It’s cold anyway. Steam from under the streets,
Identification numbers. Codes.
They give the replicants memories.
Everything about them is human—
emotions, desires, childhoods,
pain, joy, and they don’t know what they are.
Utilitarian apartments in a world
designed by dystopian designer set designers.
“I don’t work here anymore, remember?”
“Talk about beauty and the beast, she’s both.”
Sound of high heels in the night on the street.
Pre-World War II buildings falling apart, dilapidated,
ceilings and walls crumbling, wet.
There’s a woman in the photograph.
People smoking in sleazy nightclubs.
Snake dancers, alleys, fires in ashcans. Am I me or
someone else, or no one at all? If that’s the case either way.
Women in forties style hats with nets over their eyes,
old cars with fins. It’s 1942 and 2049
at the same time. It’s classified information.
Maybe you are a replicant & all the memories & feelings &
old photos & music lessons were programmed by a
manufacturing corporation. You dream in music.
Vast dark spaces, cluttered grey places.
Replicants who misquote Blake.
“Fiery the angels fell; deep thunder rolled
around their shores; burning with the fires of Orc”
There’s no way out but to climb on
impossible broken cornices, wet steel girder.
Rotting ropes on a roof in steady, cold lines of rain.
Screens and monitors, digital beeps.
They will find you no matter what. Deep replicant sleeps,
origami left behind. You have to go north for safety
even though there is none.

 — Daniel Sklar

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