Digits are glued to screens like a tongue
to a winter lamppost; removal is a matter
of melting ice, waiting, and a gentle eye
between tenderness and mettle. Can you
commit to paragraphs and the case for
vindictive lottery addiction? There's an
essay there, about artificial absurdity,
natural intelligence, and whatever
human-made apparent isms acquire
the barnacles of the faithful. Prophecies
come in passive voice: they happen to us.
And whoever we are, that's what we did,
a binary system with thirty two options
netted out to a future that was written
by the present's razor quill. A4, paper
rockets scream: 9.8 rainbows per hectare
per second per breath, falsely equivocating
at the fork of small and large. Feast is
a famine of self and that's separate from
my me, as life can end but the self goes
on in the memorials that crater other
minds. And it's the self that's peckish,
unprepared to see its self in a backlit mirror,
and ready to fight to the last byte.
Roman Ryan 