40 Weeks*

Door forced–someone dared to use a key.
No electronic trail was left. Or the motion sensor
followed the signature of empty air as though
something dead exited stage left.

Critical alarm–the ice is too warm, the frozen meat
thawing. Not global warming, no, not that–just
global hunger waiting for half-hour lunches,
catered meetings, the stress before a realization
that everything is built on widening cracks.

Duress alarm, pull stations and rabbit holes
through dense walls the colour of old oak, stained pages
of ancient documents, calm in the presence
of too little and ‘no’. After all, real performance erodes profit.


To the computer screen which long ago sucked the last
creative drops out of me, which wandered into
the ethernet, which became a trillion electrons scattered
through the umbilical chord of a million actions
and transactions–beware. One day between a dollar sign
and an em, your mind will wander like rusty railway track
through elm and cedar, maple and birch–across river
and through town and the electrical stops of 0 and 1,
will twitch, reform the universe in a way no logic could–

and you’ll dream.


*In 40 weeks, I'll be sixty and I'm going to retire. No, really.