Still the Dust Sings

after ‘The waste Land’, by T.S. Eliot I met a woman on a glitching screen, her face a whisk of pixels and prayer. She spoke of shattered systems and survived code, “The cloud remembers everything,” she said, "but forgets what matters.” A rat hurried through my feed at dawn, past memes and headlines, each a kind of omen. I tried to fast-forward spring, but April clawed through my notifications anyway. In a thread of ghost towns and tagged regret, I noticed a cafe with no floor, only static, A man sipped Espresso beside a socket, charging his distress while waiting for replies. Data rains in blasts, all prediction and pop-ups. The Sun sets in Beta, and we refresh the silence, hoping for something new to load. For then, below algorithms and ash, a bud breaks code in cracked concrete, muted, untagged, but blooming still.