For the Love of Wisdom.

If you translate the title to Ancient Greek, it's a bit of a giveaway.

"I'm hit! I'm hit!"

I wrestle for control of a sapient machine,

Suffering the impact like my brother before me.

He let it cripple him, he has the scars to prove it,

The fighter in him was critically damaged.

But it would take a redhead fire to rob his pure oxygen.

He would burn like Apollo before rising to build a new Empire.

 

Oh what a difference one vowel can make!

I beg for the wisdom of the Stoics, desperately seeking their advice.

Each a disapproving parent, they grimace at my previous record,

Marked red by two exit wounds.

The first my own, the last the blood of another.

The former: A diminutive rebel who shrugs or sighs, an expert in inflicting apathetic injury.

The latter: A tyrant whose tears track their targets like missiles,

Ever seeking drama in the theatre of war,

No lover of peace.

 

The antique sages finally speak, they shake their heads:

"Follow your orders", they tell me. I, like a clockwork soldier,

Must march to the tune of the catch and the finish.

Lactic acidosis is a pain I can better deal with.

In this pursuit, as in my other,

It's preferable to ditch the rush.

 

I have been gifted more time (The Longest Time, in fact).

But with it comes disorder, a custom of our strange, unsightly universe.

But three spatial dimensions might be more agreeable, willing to bend.

An interval of repulsive seconds beyond measure, may be prettied

By a little distance.

 

This gamble is binary; I will either win or lose.

Maybe in Everett's Theory I could do both,

But not here, where I am dictated to by the bounds of reality.

The final words are those of Seneca:

"Remove severe restraint and what will become of virtue?"

Hold your fire.