Before a single machine appears in Brian Routh's "The last machines", the speaker has already been silenced. The poem opens on a body being choked, and everything after that, the noise, the glass, the sirens, reads like what comes out when a voice has been denied a proper outlet. Its central idea seems to be that damage done early does not vanish. It turns into a loud, repetitive, self-destroying world, and that world teaches no one anything.
The first stanza is built from fragments. "Strangled in my youth" has no "I was" in front of it, so the grammar is strangled too. "Gulped shut" is a striking phrase, because gulping normally takes something in, yet here it closes the mouth, as if the speaker swallowed their own words. Then comes "silent nerves shaking", where stillness and movement collide. Nothing is said aloud, but the body is clearly not at peace. Fear is held inside with nowhere to go.
In the second stanza the speaker turns outward, but "them" has no clear referent. On a first reading it sounds like other people; by the end of the poem it may well mean the machines. The advice is "don't try to tell them", which is odd coming from someone who could not speak in the first place. Silence is being handed on as a policy. The line breaks do quiet work here: "leave them be / to be" lets the second "be" hang alone on its own line, so that bare existence becomes the point. It faintly recalls the famous "to be" of Hamlet, though that may be an echo rather than an intention. Then "in consequence" arrives, the most formal phrase in the poem, cold and almost legal after so many bodily words. It sounds like a verdict: let them exist and take what follows.
The third stanza is where the poem gets loud. "Running naked" plays on two meanings. A machine runs when it operates, a person runs when they flee or rampage, and the poem lets the two overlap until it is hard to say which is meant. "Naked" suggests stripped of casing, of disguise, of protection. The next three lines are all present participles with no subjects: "breaking bottles / sirens blazing / guns popping". Because the verbs never finish, the action feels like a loop rather than an event. The sounds do the work as well. The hard b's of "breaking bottles" crack like glass, and "popping" makes gunfire sound almost trivial, like a party trick. Sirens normally mean help is coming, but these only "blaze", and nobody arrives. The scene could be a celebration, a riot or a crime scene, and the poem refuses to say which.
The structure sharpens the effect. The stanzas run three, four, five and then two lines, so the poem swells and is suddenly cut off. There is no rhyme and no punctuation at all, and the lines are short, with two or three stresses each, so they land like blows. The lack of rhyme matters at the end, where the only real chime is the balance of the final pair:
live and learn
die and forget
"Live and learn" is normally a consoling saying, a promise that experience pays. The poem copies its shape and reverses the payoff. If learning needs a survivor to remember, then dying erases the lesson, and the cycle starts again with the next strangled youth. Judging by the stanza about "the last machines", the word "last" may be ironic, since nothing in the poem suggests this is really the end of anything. And because the poem stops without a full stop, it seems to forget itself in the act of ending.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves unexplained. We are never told who the machines are, what strangled the speaker, or whether the speaker pities, fears or envies the noise outside. That openness is its strength. In about forty words it ties private silence to public chaos and suggests that one produces the other. It also makes the reader do the work of deciding who "they" are, which is the opposite of what the speaker could do.