Only in last year's glow,
could this year's Red
chorizo salami come,
and I haven't gone yet.

Gone over the edge
of these Breakfast tables,
in empty cup
or full of caffeine.

Gone over to home not yet
cuz the Brain keeps
me here in a dish,
in artificial cerebral spinal fluid,
or let's just call it
Recording Solution

Don't mix the salts!
Cross-contamination
is a killer for these Recordings.

Does our family speak to us on cold winter's night?
Even if there's no creek to crackle,
no stiff spines, no furry trees,
nothing but a Van Gogh room
in Somerville
and digital clocks ticking.

Does our family still speak?
Chattering away,
Background processes,
Garbled noise, garbage without
wisdom because we've lost the sophistication
to crack ancient encryption.

We hear the history,
and mimic vocalization like a song bird,
dolphin or elephant
each with converging neural circuits.

Members living the same stream?

It's easier to hack the data line,
when we've trained on same sets:
a missing wife,
black and white photos,
and a grandfather clock.

There's an elegance
to the math

but

it's too complicated for
us to understand much less
make a career of writing
ring looped code
or father toddling

equations.

At best, we fancy Newtonian
relationships,

common sense ones that any 17
century young Romanticist
would Realize

The faster we accelerate into Love the greater
the Force of our relationship
and the Mass of our egos multiply the effect

A Love in motion stays in motion

If only we live in vacuums

our fairy tale would never end
and the forever after is locked,
safe behind Castle doors

But our stories are more like Grimm Tales

Impulse
forces of liberated Egos
change the trajectory
of our real

love.

Random white cue *****
bounce us into a side pocket.

And who's to know?

Are the cul-de-sacs
any worse than
landing in an odd corner,
bunched in with only
a stripped
or solid ball?

At least we didn't scratch
against some misshapen Black
eight

Alert!

Oh. It's only a reminder.
Automated, automatically sent
to us.

An email, a text.
They pop on devices,
trained that way.

Tomorrow's a birthday.
Always tomorrow an Alert!
Someone's born.

Yet, the helper has become a daemon.
Friendly assistance
become nudges of melancholy.

A Daemon for grieving?

How many Alerts
can the heart take?

Yearly jolts,
automated realization
that our family is fading.

Not tomorrow's children
born into midnight's Alert,
but the child father,
mother, sister, and brother we
remember in bleaching photos.

Chemically fading away,
decaying like data
on hard drives.

Our stormy lives
remembered with
a half-life of gentle reminders.
Remembered as
ghostly background processes
sending alerts of birthdays so long
ago there's no trace except
in shared memories.

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