Google Me (11/06 draft)

At first the map's a blur until it takes you where you want to go.
But by the time the pixels crystallize into a view, it's dated.

Are the ghosts plasma, millions of pixels scattered in debris trails?
Am I so scattered that the voices that make me are not coming through.
They take away the real stuff and you're stuck with that reconstituted lemonade.

It would however be far better to perish fast than to be paralyzed for life.
For the eye to shut than for the lids to be sliced open so you could see just a little.
A blaze of glory gone before a smouldering ember in the grate.

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How the ghosts like to speak through rotating machinery,
through the white noise made by smoke alarms when they go off,
how they speak through short-wave broadcasts when a preacher
in Texas isn't howling his readings of prophecy at the moon,
and how, between the rogue states and the catatonics rigged with baby-monitors
a dead aunt instructs some complete strangers how to fold correctly her linen,
how the surface hisses of a stereo are either aural Rorshach patterns
or the medium by which the dead return to instruct us, their bodies
ectoplasmic, pixellated, but streaked as comet-trails--Hale-Bopp
the last bus for them departing to the Empyrean.

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11/18/06

post-boomer couples would rebound from their Elements if
in Vermont or if New Hampshire their Hummers to buy
boom-boxes, home entertainment tuners
and giant high-definition liquid crystal wall-screens
on which to view computer-animated bestiaries in blu-ray.

And after the party Dad in his untucked sportshirt
had paid the bill, the kids rebounded in the backseat,
all that equipment crowded into the van in transit.
They had to wear white shirts and ties as part
of their role as sales personnel. Those were his friends.

Elastic-limbed, luminiscent cartoon zebras
in the HDTV demo. To the naked eye as detailed,
as articulated as mosaic tile, as mosaic walls.

suburban post-boomers whose children bounded from the SUV
to browse giant screens and double woofers to fill
their McMansions with light and sound.