love song for girl in chatroom #2
love song for girl in chatroom #2
(upon the bytes of the idoru’s breast)
for kris
The heart electric pulses in the void: black-hot
as any circuitry or synapse, but not so clean
or sanitary. The heart, transliterated binary, may rot
as any corpse submerged in swamp serene—
What better picture of data flows that careen
to stand-still small talk and your shuttered eyes,
become whirlpools from which you reach obscene,
a siren, glittering in fractals, whose languid cries
repeat a careful pattern: birdsong digitized.
The heart may love a program. The heart may be
itself only a protocol, pathology and lies
repeated, no more the self than Hume could see.
But though perhaps we embrace by cold equation,
in the archive, are not hearts endless in every incarnation?
—
published in Windfall, Truman State University literary magazine, 2003