They go thru flow cells
and return a million read

Weekly poems sent
anonymously to be sequenced
in a massively parallel
batch job

The hits come back
in blinking dots,
ephemeral likes, individual
happy flashes from
bar-coded singlets.

But how to know
when a solitary spot
has read our entire
genome?

Have you binged
on the DNA
of our identity?

Can you tell us
who I are
and
where I are going?

It is a measure of time's passage. An ancient way intertwining all cultures, and yet this time the changing is different. The leaves cycle colors and fall from the branches. I heard the chainsaws the other day, and thought that they were trimming the bare branches back for next year.

I was wrong.

They had cut down the entire tree.

It made sense.

All last winter, I heard it scrape against the building during stormy nights. My modern utility agrees but the monkey is lost with old rhythms cut from the base, and looking out a reflecting window gives no sense of where the time is going.

It's a valley carved by moving water
It's a face wrinkled by time's current
It's a hike across the valley's face
It's a trek in through our granite life
It's a shout into the cool mountain air
It's a spike tracing our cloudy memory
It's a familiar echo bounced  
It's a family reverberation gone
The mountain has moved
The river is still

I thought
the carbon monoxide detector
was malfunctioning,
her pulsed chirps
pierce so sharp
unlike any stray
songs of carousing
cat

Supposedly, she brings
good luck like rain
on your wedding
day

A dreambot cricket
more machine
in sound than any slumbering
Kafka insect
bed bug mate
I've every slept
with

She wakes me
in nightly false
alarms but when her short
life is done
maybe I'll miss
nocturnal jolts
like I miss
cold misty
rain

This daily Trial
has transformed
tadpoles to chicken
liver-- a Metamorphosis,
a selection process
most Unnatural.
Darwin's joke,
light humor
to ease our
quest for Waze
into the Castle.

the leaves are changing colors fast!
just two days ago, they were green on the inside,
fringed with yellow, gold and crimson edges.
today the jaundice seeps in bunches and bushels,
reaching in along the veins and branches
into the capitulating green core.
tips of exposed twigs reveal
falling, failing tribal leaves
in the autumn cool air.
skeletons of Halloween start to stick
their bony hands into the even darkness.

And what about the days
that don't come,
or the Hours not spent
buying flowers from Edeka?

Where do they go?

Do they join Walter
in some daydreaming
intermittent reality?

Is the Time
evaporated by Entrepreneurs
burning our candles
at both ends to turn
steam driven carbines
for our adiabatic work
cycles underneath Caves of Steel?

Is it enough to live
part of someone else's
dream because we know
that our's Comes this
way Wicked?

Actuators, cogs, brain bit,
and organoids all on Chips
or ships setting sail
into rosy fingered robots
of dawn.

Ahoy mateys!

We set sail for a Manifest
Destiny without O Captain,
My Captain; though the civil
struggle continues dressed up
in some ******* suit.