III:

I was the one they should have chosen. I was the plaything of their mind's eye.
In the thousand rooms of the workforce, you'll never see a brighter desk.
The blood that runs through my spokes, the heaving claws that so delicately etched this metal.
But damn their ivory collars and their high-nosed walk down the corridor.
With timeless thrones at the top, their glance never met mine,
and for all the light that shines on my hands alone,
it would not serve to inform the blind.

IV:

"Your mother must not have made it past under-grad," the professor said to me, "if she taught you that Hope was on its way to us."

They laughed and they laughed.

"Are we so far from finding it?" I inquired. "Is our science all in vain?"

"Our science has digressed. Hope is a fiction that may have spurred the beginnings of things. Of great arts and great kingdoms, of wars and crusades. But it is irrelevant now. We are modern man with modern needs. There is no more waiting."

"My mother lived in a place they'll never find again, " I said,

"A desert that will never exist again. But exist, it once did.

But I suppose I'll hold on to my fiction."