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Published:
2024-08-26
Completed:
2025-07-04
Words:
1,398
Chapters:
3/3
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If You Must Die: Poetry of the Voice of Tarn

Summary:

sing for Kaon
smoke-shredded optics
chemical sky

-

Poems by Megatronus.

Notes:

So apparently I am a Transformers fan now. It's astolat's fic that did it. I believe astolat came up with the Voice of Tarn as Megatron(us)'s pen name, too - somebody please correct me if I'm wrong!

I have seen some of TFP, some of G1, read part of a novel and a couple comics from various continuities... so this is continuity soup with a side of possible inaccuracy, to the extent any of that matters when it's Megatron's in-universe poetry and not an actual story. (I am obsessed with the fact that Megatron is canonically a poet. This was inevitable.)

Chapter 1

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Untitled 14.

A girder fell on the mech before me.
His processor was crushed, they said –
beyond saving.
(He died in the space of a moment,
they did not say. He died before the pain.)
I saw his spark flicker in his splintered chest
as I hauled the girder off him –
a dead thing still fighting to live.
They sent me and two others
to bear him on our shoulders
to the scrapyard
to be reused.

 

Untitled 27.

I’m told some mecha wear energon jewelry.

Beneath tons of rock
the pickaxes lift and fall,
lift and fall.
Half a cube if you hit quota
all our processors in power-saving mode
non-essential subroutines shut down.
Lift and fall,
lift and fall.
The glimmer of blue is promise and warning:
careful. Careful. Do not strike too hard.
We all knew someone who was hasty,
who lies buried.
We prise the crystals loose.
We pile them in carts
and watch them taken from us;
a few come back
in half-cube rations.
Others,
I am told,
adorn the rings of senators.

Do they know how eagerly energon burns?

 

Untitled 40.

Words tortured into order on the screen
March to a drumbeat echoed from the past.
You call those marches poems; every breem
You praise the next for being like the last.
You call that beauty. Regimented lines
That halt and go and turn and step apace
You call a sign of virtue, as the Primes
In virtue likewise regiment our race.
So you would have us halt and stand and go –
so you would have us written by our betters.
But there’s another kind of poetry I know
that eats the sparks of lying verses and their tyrant writers.
Your regiments are vorns dead, if they ever lived –
but keep writing as you have
and you’ll see living armies,
closer and deadlier than you imagine.

 

Untitled 87.

sing for Kaon
smoke-shredded optics
chemical sky
sing for Kaon
mecha in the street talking drunkenly
of yesterday’s factory collapse
three dozen still inside and
one day that will be us
if we’re lucky
bitter laughter
sing
sing louder
screech of metal against metal
world-ending crash of acid-pocked stone
at last eaten through
one day, one day
but the three dozen will die
still trapped inside
one day as yesterday
yesterday as one day

atop slagged corpses
they are building again
old stone and new girders

therefore sing Kaon
lift shredded optics
if you must die
die today.

Notes:

I made up the energon jewelry thing, but it seems like the sort of ill-advised fad that could plausibly have happened. It probably did in fact end when somebody caught on fire.

Megatron does not appreciate the irony of the sonnet as poetic form adding a layer of meaning to his anti-sonnet sonnet that could not have been achieved in a free-verse version of the same poem. Because he is Megatron and he doesn't do that kind of subtlety.

Please leave a comment if you'd like!

Chapter 2

Summary:

Unbury the mines
let light fall from the towers
let it tumble wingless downward
let it find no foothold
above the deep places
like severed lines laid open to the sky

Notes:

Look who's not done writing these!

I've decided to number them as if from a larger collection, in the order Megatron(us) wrote them. Eventually this is probably going to turn into fictional academia. I do love fictional academia.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Untitled 6.

Quota increased to 3 carts per miner per orn
50 librae to a cart is 150 librae per orn
2 librae unrefined is about a tenth of a tank on me
so 20 librae is about a tank
so one cart is 2.5 tanks still unrefined
so quota is 7.5 full tanks per orn
7.5 mecha not hungry 7.5 miners not stealing the energon out of our own carts to make it through the shift coming in below quota paid a half ration starving slowly 7.5 I could feed out of my own work
if my work were my own

and really the number is higher
since they break down the stuff, make it potent
and send us back the dregs
1 ration is half a cube per orn that's about half a tank on me
half that if I don't meet quota
quota which is 7.5 full tanks unrefined
and I have never not been hungry

which is why they tell us it isn't our function to think

 

Untitled 20.

How can I write what is not over
what overflows my words
energon out of my cupped hands
how can I write?
Am I writing in innermost energon
spattered across the mineshaft wall
more
with
every
blow
my poem should be to seize the guard's baton
and write the right mech's ending
but I have a battle to live for
so I watch the dying die
write in their blood I promise vengeance
but how how how

 

Untitled 62.

Unbury the mines
let light fall from the towers
let it tumble wingless downward
let it find no foothold
above the deep places
like severed lines laid open to the sky

 

Untitled 75.

Only to the dark can I say
that I am tired
that these words bleed me like splinters of bedrock
rise up, rise up,
beaten down, beaten
the rallies dispersed and the riots
how long?
I am death-gray waiting
energon of foes my only brightness
and down, down, down
my brothers running on fumes
my brothers death-gray
no brightness for them but the rage I write
come die in the light
how long?

 

Untitled 99.

Listen! They are already dying.
You argue for peace, for measured alteration -
I too want peace, but I have never seen its face.
Nor you. Nor have you seen its face.
Yesterday I passed by a mech offlined in a gutter
and I did not stop.
I was hurrying somewhere.
Yesterday I offlined a mech in the gutter
and again
I did not stop
because I was hurrying somewhere.
Are you not hurrying?
Will you stop where you are
and imagine a face
you can call by the name of peace?

 

Untitled 131.

Peace, you say, is the evil forgotten
the miners grateful, brought out of the dark
and polished, newly painted, taught to write, taught to speak
newly, as if they never spoke before
down in the depths unspoken of -
Peace, you say, is the sun on the towers of Iacon
in flawless refraction poured down to our grateful optics
upturned, within whose depths no shadows cling.
Peace, you say, is our love and our fury forgotten,
the dark forgotten, the dead left rusting
amid dark tunnels, the grief -
Peace, you say, is your hands washed clean of our energon,
unblemished as Iacon's towers, as flawless and gleaming,
clasping our grateful hands, leading us upward,
out of our shadows
into your amnesiac light.

Peace, you say.

Notes:

I don't know how much a libra is for Cybertronians. I cribbed the word from Latin because there were literally no canonical Cybertronian units of weight that I could find. What's up with that? Don't they know I need to write math poems?

Please leave a comment if you'd like!

Chapter 3

Summary:

You, a melting heat
a hunger blue-burning -
life as strong as death
beauty like terror
your chassis cannot hide you.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Untitled 36.

You should not have let me know
there was such a thing as sunlight.
You, unsated by fountains -
did you think that I could starve
and not learn hunger?
You should never have let me know
that you existed. Down in the dark
I hated the stone above my helm -
you should have let me believe
it was stone that enslaved me.
Now
by this light
I can see who to bury.

 

Untitled 38.

Afterward
we will watch the wheeling stars
await the everpresent sun.
We will sit in silence
drinking the light.
Afterward.
First we take the surface.
First we break through to the sky.

 

Untitled 93.

You, a melting heat
a hunger blue-burning -
life as strong as death
beauty like terror
your chassis cannot hide you.
Nucleus of a star
you liquefy durasteel
burn through Primus' core.
You, a comet
wrapped in slow time and civility
still you trail fire
scar the world
with light.

 

Untitled 138.

Believe me
I would unpeople Cybertron
smelt you down, and myself down
and all your loyalists and mine -
I would extinguish us and the memory of us
from this old indifferent universe
before I would permit you, smiling
your optics glowing with forgiveness
to bury us again.

 

Untitled 143.

You call them friends
these temporary creatures
outgrowths of the detritus
that coats this rock
brief imitators of our shape -
and I know why.
I could believe
you came here searching for it
this death you tried to make us wear
and we refused -
how glad you must have been
to find these creatures.
How glad to find a thing
as weak
as you used to dream we were
before we woke you.

 

Untitled 152.

A star did not forge you.
Nor were you more than a mech
full of unhappiness that felt like fire
anger that felt like fire
but was not -
nor were you less than a mech
with a sword in his hand
when they called you a god or a monster
because you killed.
But others also killed. You were lucky
and skilled, it is true
and vicious, because you were afraid
and would not know it. None of this makes a god.
You knew it then
but you were perhaps too fond of metaphor
and you did not know how to tell the truth
without that lie.
Perhaps there was no other way.
At any rate I've found none.

Notes:

It was very fun to write Megatron being bigoted against humans. (What do you mean, they're people? They're not even immortal!)

Please leave a comment if you'd like!