The Unknown

“All we know about the real life of people [from Greece and Rome] is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for the theatre back then.”

 — Stage Manager, Our Town

And what will they know of now,
when the live stream of memes
runs dry. When you and I are
gone, but the hard drives live on.
And the Netflix fix has broken. When
the shows evaporate into the ethernet.
Even Caesar salad turns pallid on the flaking billboard.

Who will record the fall of roam, the fall of
home. When no one has connection, what
lasting recollection of our every day: The flow of
the dishwasher humming, the kids bumming
around the house, the pet mouse running her
never-ending wheel, how we steal
breaths between shows,

how everyone knows everything and nothing at all.
But the tall fountain of knowledge has become a
mountain range of strange drivel scribbling graffiti
across civil discourse. Is this how the vandals and
the ostracized goths won swaths of Rome, did they
moan at memes, have the gaul to fall to fits of
laughter after Nero’s fire.

Why are we always focused on the foul, on what’s
unfair, the air of grievance in allegiance with falsehood,
and not the flowers we can cut and share, the air
outside as we confide in the earth, the vase filled and
filled and filled again.
And unmaking the space we’ve built between us.

Close Those Windows

The same week as the presidential
election a pack of monkeys escape a
research lab in the low country. Close
your windows, we are warned. Marauding
monkeys might go after unripe bananas
on the counter.

I have too many windows open this week.
I can’t close them. Can’t stop observing
the results of this American experiment.
It’s making a mess in my house. In my mind.
I find myself bracing every few minutes. My upper
arms burn with the effort of protecting me from
nothing but information. Then the cabinet is
opened. All the can-he-actually-do-that’s thrown
around like we’re trying to hash out what comes
next. What comes next are the Emus.

They’ve escaped confinement, too. We’re
assured they are no danger to anyone. Just a
nuisance racing jacked-up-trucks along the
highway, standing in the way, heads buried deep
where they cannot see the troops of monkeys
throwing poo at windows we still haven’t
closed.

Senryu on watching OpenAI react to DeepSeek

kind of meta taking a page from their playbook