The Heretical Cogs

I was sitting waiting in the car, my daily vigil at Catie's college, watching the kids playing in their schoolyard next door. They went inside, gratefully, out of the cold and the little drama of competing scavenger birds played itself out yet again. I was trying to get a picture of a couple of Pied Wagtails that had vibrated to within a few feet of me and cursing that I didn't have my SLR with me when I noticed the old telegraph pole that I'd been sitting directly in front of for the last hour. Attached to various points on its cracked surface were the remains of several old cogs. Each cog had been impaled through its central hole with a nail and they hung crucified around the shaft of the pole. The nails were rusted into lumpish, deformed caricatures of their original sharp forms, the cogs were twisted, rusted through, encrusted with lichen growth, some of them bearing deep wounds that spoke of tools and purpose rather than time. They had not had an easy death. Behind me was the Engineering department of the college and so it seemed just to assume that the presence of these tortured, martyred artefacts was connected in some way with these machine shops. We're they seeking sanctuary there from some Luddite mob of Abingdonians? Did they make it thus far, to within sight of safety when overtaken by pitchfork wielding peasants whose rough hands hoisted them up onto this gallows tree of singing wire and hammered home the nails as flickering torches lit the hellish scene? Or was this carnage the work of mechanics and their students? Did some dire compassionless inquisition, dressed in ceremonial boiler suites, distinguished in their station by exaggerated, outsized hard hats encrusted with gold and graven symbols, their identities masked by mirrored safety goggles, sit in judgement on these mere cogs in the machine? Were they guilty of some heresy against the dogma of The Engineer's creed of mass and acceleration? Did brutal hands break these teeth and bend these sprockets to tear their secrets from them? What confessions did they scream at the impassive inquisitors to end their agonies before they were dragged out to the looming, bone pale stake of the telegraph pole?