Metal Foundry: The Poem That Waited 34 Years for Its Ending
On February 8, 1990, I sat down with a notebook and wrote a poem in Spanish called Fundidora de Metal A.C.M.E. I was twenty-one years old, and I don't remember whether I fully understood what I was trying to say. Looking at those handwritten pages now, I suspect some part of me understood far more than I realized.
The poem imagined human beings entering something I called Metal Foundry A.C.M.E. It was a place where people were stripped down, melted, reshaped and poured into another form before being sent back into the world again, like a recycling center for our souls. Somewhere in the middle of that strange little poem, my twenty-one-year-old self asked a question that stopped me when I read it again 34 years later: ¿Y tu alma? And your soul?
The answer was.... silence.
Then came the cruel logic of the machine. The soul didn't matter. Eventually the metal would melt, the body would become liquid, and whatever remained would simply be poured into another mold. “Así es la vida,” I wrote. “Todos terminan en la Fundidora de Metal.” That is life. Everyone ends up in the metal foundry.
I look at those words now and wonder what exactly I had already noticed as a young woman about the world. Because I think I had begun to see the machinery. I saw a world that took human beings full of imagination, tenderness, curiosity and possibility and asked them to become useful. Productive. Employable. Obedient. Efficient. Wake up. Go to work. Produce. Consume. Pay the bills. Repeat. And we called it “adulthood,” but somewhere inside me, even then, I suspected something was being sacrificed to keep the machinery running...
Our soul.
Thirty-four years later, I returned to the foundry. This time I decided to write it in English. But this time it became the lyrics for a song called Metal Foundry. And without consciously setting out to reproduce that old poem line by line, the same question appeared again: “And your soul, does it even matter? In this life, will it just shatter?” There I was. The twenty-one-year-old girl, still asking me the same damn question.
Only now I had lived long enough to understand more of what she had been trying to tell me. I have watched decades of human life organized around productivity. I have watched people give some of the healthiest years of their bodies to companies that could replace them before their desk was cold. I have watched wages struggle to keep pace with the cost of simply existing. I have watched exhaustion masquerade as ambition, burnout become normal, and busyness become something we learned to brag about.
Sadly, somewhere along the way, we became extraordinarily good at measuring human productivity while becoming strangely uncomfortable talking about human worth. Perhaps that is why the foundry returned. But something changed between the poem and the song. The girl who wrote the original seemed to believe everyone eventually disappeared into the machine. The woman who rewrote it wasn't quite so sure anymore.
Tucked inside the bridge of the new song are words that never existed in my 1990 poem: “But I feel the light, deep beneath this night. It calls, it calls, it calls…” Maybe that is the entire story.
The machine didn't disappear. But I believe something inside us has begun to refuse to disappear with it. Over the last three years, I have watched that refusal become increasingly visible and loud. More people are beginning to question the bargain we inherited. Why should a human life be organized almost entirely around labor? Why should surviving require surrendering so much of our living? Why has exhaustion become a badge of honor? Why does productivity determine worth? Why are we protecting systems that seem increasingly incapable of protecting the people living inside them?
Then technology began doing something extraordinary. The very machinery that has demanded more and more human labor began learning how to perform some of that labor itself. Automation. Robotics. Artificial intelligence. And now suddenly we have arrived at a strange threshold. For generations, we feared becoming machines. Now the machines may be giving us an opportunity to reconsider why we ever believed human beings should live like them.
I don't say that naively. What comes next will not automatically be kinder.
Technology can become another foundry if its benefits belong only to the few. If automation removes jobs without changing how people access food, shelter, healthcare, security and dignity, then we haven't broken the chain of exploitation at all. We have simply built a more efficient furnace.
And perhaps that is why Metal Foundry feels more relevant to me now than it did when I first imagined it. The question is no longer simply whether jobs will change. They already are. The deeper question is what we will decide a human being is worth when human labor is no longer required in quite the same way. Perhaps that is the reckoning my younger self could sense but couldn't yet name. For centuries, we have built civilizations around what human beings can produce. Maybe the next chapter asks what human beings might become when producing is no longer the primary justification for our existence.
Maybe we become artists and caregivers, gardeners and inventors, neighbors and thinkers. Maybe we have time to sit beside someone who is grieving without calculating what else we should be accomplishing. Maybe we make things nobody technically needs but everyone somehow needs. Maybe we rediscover curiosity, community, craftsmanship, contemplation and play. Maybe we finally remember that being alive was never supposed to be synonymous with being economically useful.
And this is where the woman in the artwork for the new Metal Foundry song has taken on a meaning I didn't anticipate when I first began creating her. She is walking toward the furnace, not away from it.
At twenty-one, I imagined the souls of people's in a conveyor belt being taken into the foundry and melted into whatever shape the world required of them. Thirty-four years later, when I created the lyrics for this song from my original poem, I imagined something different. This woman knows the foundry is there. She knows what it does. She can see the furnace. She can feel its heat. And still she walks toward it.
But..... maybe she isn't walking toward her destruction at all.
Maybe she is walking toward the machinery itself.
There is something almost defiant about that image for me now. She is no longer in that conveyor belt being carried along by the machinery, waiting to discover what shape the system will pour her next into. She is walking toward the foundry with her eyes open because she finally understands something my twenty-one-year-old self couldn't yet see. The machinery was never inevitable. It was built. The molds were built. The rules were built. The systems that taught us to measure a human life by its productivity were built.
But.... anything human beings have built can also be questioned, dismantled and rebuilt differently.
Perhaps that is what really changed between the young woman who wrote Fundidora de Metal A.C.M.E. and the woman who returned to it thirty-four years later. At twenty-one, I could see the system consuming us, but I couldn't yet imagine a world outside of it. The foundry seemed permanent. Everyone eventually went in and that was that.
Now I can imagine another possibility.
Maybe she is walking toward the furnace not to be melted by it, but to dismantle the very machinery that kept feeding our souls into it.
Because perhaps the systems we created around ourselves were never permanent. Perhaps work, money, productivity, status and all the identities we built around them were only molds. Human inventions that became so old and so familiar that eventually we mistook them for laws of nature.
And now, strangely enough, the furnace may be hot enough to melt those old antiquated and exploitative molds too.
That is what fascinates me about this moment. We are frightened because we can see something ending, but we don't yet know what will be poured in its place. Yes... automation and artificial intelligence could deepen the oldest forms of exploitation we have known, concentrating wealth and power while leaving millions scrambling for their place in a world that no longer requires their labor.
Or they could force us into a conversation humanity has avoided for generations: if a person's economic usefulness is no longer the measure of their value, then what is?
Thirty-six years after writing Fundidora de Metal in that notebook, I no longer think my twenty-one-year-old self was writing about metal at all. I think she was writing about the fear of being consumed by a world that could recognize our usefulness while remaining blind to our humanity.
She asked, ¿Y tu alma? And your soul?
I don't think the woman I am today needs to answer that question anymore. I think she needs to ask the question again, only this time of all of us. If the old foundry really is beginning to crack, if the machinery that shaped generations of human life is finally changing, what will we build in its place?
Will we simply create another furnace and call it progress? Or will we finally build a world that remembers why the human being was worth saving in the first place?
Maybe that is why this song had to wait thirty-four years to find its ending. Because perhaps Metal Foundry was never a song about disappearing into the machine. Perhaps it was waiting for the moment when we would finally understand that we built the foundry.
And if we built it... maybe we are the ones who get to dismantle it.
☥
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