Gigabyte
The fact is that computers, like people,
have no problem remembering the messy stuff:
it’s forgetting they can’t do.
How much memory can you sell me? I want it all, asleep and awake, at the light touch of a finger. I want the blood to stay liquid, the bones never to rise again, the stink to stay undissipated in either still or moving air.
Forget bloody algorithms, archives, downloads, codices, indices, books, paper-brittle files to fragment into contemplation, make me rest on my heels, make me wonder at all this dust and cold coffee, ask what I am really after and is it worth it.
I have seen you watching action glowing in the dark bodies twisting, coupling, dying out as the power dies leaving images burnt on memory ready to retrieve. We know our passion is present; our passion is action.
You know, too, such frenzies are best gulped down fresh before some ungodly troika variously rendered as reason, recall, reflection clatters up the driveway like unwelcome parents coming home early because they forgot the key, when you thought they would be out all night and leave you to it with all your mindless friends.
Editor's Note: Don't miss "Why Poets Sometimes Think in Numbers," Carol Dorf's introduction to math poetry in TW.
Art Information
- “City Lights” © Lois Shelden; used by permission
Mary Cresswell is from Los Angeles and lives on New Zealand's Kapiti Coast. She is a retired copy editor and took up writing poetry about a dozen years ago. Her third book, Trace Fossils, was published in early 2011.
For more information, please see her profile on the New Zealand Book Council website.
