To be chanted whenever the O Machine 1 fails:

Rumor has it that the Enigma
Was to Churchill a foul stigma

And that the ancient, creaking Babbage
It was to him but so much cabbage

Colossus One and Colossus Two
Those gadgets too he began to rue

They say he let them rust and rot -
The pity is that he did not


(I checked with the Lizard People on this – Churchill’s secret Second World War computers, powered by a primordial Lemurian source of energy so dangerous that even speaking its name in the ancient language of the Atlanteans is said to be fatal, are secured in a locked vault on Oak Island and guarded around the clock (set to Martian time) by the Trilateral Masonic-Vatican Continuum of deadly albino flying fish.)

1 E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops,” 1909, Much-anthologized

I toil in anonymity
These words will not be read
You will not drink what's in this cup
These thoughts will not be said.

I'm buried on the internet
Far out of Google's reach
In basements stacked between thick tomes
No students will I teach.

I'm outside of your consciousness
My plight will draw no tears
I will not be anthologized
On passage of the years.

I shout among the swelling crowd
And blend into the hum
I'm heard here by myself alone
No more will I become.

I would read Us over and over
til the corners of every page
fold like my dog’s ear,
one up, one down,
and every sweet nothing is
underlined, color-coded,
anthologized in the back.
Hiding under the blanket
with my childhood flashlight,
I would read Us over and over,
trying a mouthful of your
words on my tongue.
Salt, wooded citrus, coffee,
perhaps just glue and mold,
but the pages trick my nose.
I would read Us over and over—
even though I know how it ends.

anthologized or unpublished
famous or failed
obscene or obscure
young or old
poets die with their boots on
boots of trochaic luster