People more creatively put words together
When they face some restrictified rules
Like not making up unemogryfied words
That they haven't been taught in their schools.

Once it was garbage, refuse, trash.
A jumble of foul-smelling detritus hauled to the curb
And removed by sinewy men
Contributing a harder day's work
Than anyone else in the city.

Our energy now removes its entropy.
Sorted and classified into coloured bins,
We add order to our rejected matter.

Specialized trucks arrive to collect
The date-synchronized bins
Emptying them into functionally compatible mechanisms.

Most desolate is the black box of paper and cardboard.
Brochures and flyers, old magazines and letters.
Annual reports and cereal boxes.
Once these were enameled with crafted sentences,
Painstakingly typed, edited and debated,
On the monitors of copywriters.

Now they are just millions of words printed on flattened fibre substrates,
Jumbled into the bruised and scarred black box,
Entering into the recycling stream.

The nouns and adjectives,
Prepositions and gerunds,
All jumble together.

Fragments of precisely-crafted sentences and paragraphs
Are gradually broken, shredded and pulped.
Incomplete thoughts, broken phrases
Like those of a rejected stranger
In an lonely, unknown country.
Then words without context.
Then just disparate letters
Are all that remain.
Their  M  ea  N inG
G  r a Du all y
is re mov
e d
.

Just seven minutes ago,
I was but a shell of myself.
I was unfulfilled
With only the promise of
What half-a-dozen minutes hence
Might bring.

Seven minutes ago,
Oh, seven minutes ago.
I knew nothing
Of the crazy, heady,
Seven-minutes-ahead future.

Seven minutes ago,
Oh, seven minutes ago.
Those were wild times,
With dreams,
And pie-in-the-sky aspirations.

We're all more mature
And pragmatic
In this seven-minutes-ahead future.
We work hard,
And wear a no-nonsense countenance.

But some minutes,
Very rarely,
We pause
(If only for a few seconds)
And think of what might have been,
If those seven-minute-ago future dreams had come true.

With a few clicks, fragments of my identity lodge themselves
Neatly among the grimy, toil-born ones and zeros of the Others.
Mine too smell faintly of stale tea and sweaty typing fingers,
Are gritty with the dust from between my keyboard keys,
And the sand that gets between my toes
When I walk out onto the patio
Without my shoes.

I am registered.