writing about technology, and vice-versa.
And tonight I had to escape from an extended-stay
motel proxy, which was the only thing I could get
after a five-hour rehearsal in a college town
and eat lamb at a Mediterranean chain restaurant
and watch Office Space again back
in my room.
It’s this transition from the sacred to the mundane
I heard a mixed choir sing a beautiful tune acapella
and it could have made me cry
if I hadn’t had to count 12 bars of four
before coming back in.
When I turned my iPhone back on as we taxied to the gate
preparing for a dash for my connecting flight
a voicemail had arrived:
The following is important information about your flight
which has been cancelled due to an earlier cancellation
due to weather in your area.
And this is how they told me I’d be emerging from the airport
an abstractly secure place with seemingly no connections
to the city around it
Re-reading William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition made me sadly wistful for a time in the recent past, when the book’s heroine Cayce Pollard could seem hip, cool, and high-tech by cabling up a cell phone to an iBook and sending emails to people. She could do almost everything she does in the book now with an iPhone, as owned by every high school student. Continue reading “Participation Mystique”
I only learned today that the local anesthetic
my dentist used for extracting part of a tooth
and building up a partial, stumpy bit
of composite resin
in preparation for a later, larger
extraction of cash for a crown
…Ranks of books
On the sides — old Miltons, Tolstoys, Wuthering
Heights, Ackermann’s Oxford. A holograph
Copy of Keats’s “To Autumn”…— from The Dream of a House, Reynolds Price
I find myself in medias res
as one always does in dreams
in a small office, such as
an associate professor
at a branch campus
like the one I attended
would have.
My sons march on the same earth
I practiced on a different century ago
but that was before I tried writing a novel
getting married, watching
Remains of the Day.
I can’t recognize the place
because the new band room
and a fence has been added on
and so much grass has grown
since then.
As shown in a movie like Lost in Translation
best experienced with headphones, the way
sounds of a strange city come at you wrong
out of phase
are what separate you from the self
that worries about the past and future, which
liberates you for a moment
which must nevertheless be saved up for,
and paid with interest.
Still alive, folks! Working on:
a) a job
b) a business
c) a search for a better job (or more business).
I stare at the tangible presence
evoking forwarded messages
a taste of lemonade from 1978
an avatar made with a flip-phone
and connected with an inadvertent
Google+ account.
only pixels arranged in a certain way.
If they’re tolling a church bell
You figure all is well
In your little farming town
Where you have it there you have it there you have it
But if a storm should come one day
And wipe the steeple all away
You wouldn’t have it wouldn’t have it wouldn’t have it
poetrytech 