The Developing World
Incredible scientific growth, real futuristic
Development is an unstoppable progress
Millions of achievements, human creativity
I had a tape recorder, in the eighties,
and vacuum tube and transistor television
But now? Microchips drive satellites in the sky
Forty years only, it is nothing in the time
My mobile phone is a micro hi-fi system,
a television, a post, a library, an office,
a studio, and a lot of high-tech things
I can’t list everything. I can’t imagine.
What will phones be like after a hundred years?
I wasn’t seeing when my eyes were open
I never understood the song What if God was one of us, I always thought the point was that he was
I observe that I self-monitor by constantly checking my originality
I felt bad and the darkness coming so I went with them
I observe that Thoughts usually seem to be the targets for invasion disruption disordering
I’m at the high fidelity audio store Uncle John’s Band playing in a vacuum tube and it’s so pure I feel swaddled by the sound
I might be lying to myself
I think it must be the most beautiful thing anyone has ever said that we glow in the morning and in the evening we glow again
I try to think about how emotional pain feels in my body
I can slow down this thought and climb inside and strip to its marrow to feel its meaning
I experience a revelation that the more players at the table the better hand you have to have and then realize what a pathetic epiphany this is
May 1, 2020
She vibrates, a chassis minus shock absorption.
A painting, the nude descends a staircase,
rings of Saturn etched in a vacuum tube.
Or Eniac of twisted cords and switchboards.
She isn't programmed to see light beams
spraying through the trees,
nor silver bearings of morning dew.
There are no bees plunging like pistons
in the flowers, no circuit board on the step.
She climbs the jamb as a bot returning to its task.
Monitors flicker as nanoseconds pass unnoticed,
but the galaxy ends at the lintel.
She's a child of Mir, suspended upside down
in a universe where falling isn't death,
but the failure of electrodes.
Then silent as a dead star she descends.
All drives cease functioning.
She is still as a scarab,
the light years casting sand dunes on sphinxes,
until legs spasm as though coding
a final matrix for iron butterflies waiting to be born.
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