On the outskirts of one of the Milky Way’s

spiral arms, massively parallel POWER7

processors shaped a silhouette and everyone

knows what happens next: you couldn’t get

into modelling so got a job collecting urine

for algorithms. Now I know what it felt like

when fences put shepherds out of business.
Across the fuss, a corridor rolls onto another

corridor, then onto the freeway. Bundles of

selfish energies populate this fictional bit-

map, plain men in plain suits, plain men with

selfish centres driving biblical machines in

seemingly unstoppable motion. We have

spare fear stashed at the next stop, they say.
Once the data was released, we were angry

at the boggle of decimal excess, the worlds

wrought in cabling, the best red velvet cake

possible from all permutations. Our ghosting

awareness training alerted us to his thin white

skin, tanned flat as an icon. The Quran says

that a spider’s web makes the frailest home.
Elsewhere (not at all plain build), the name-

less 3.6 billion looked for food but found warm,

salted coral. Heat becomes bone, marrow, meds.

Where am I placed in this congested race into the

unknown unknown? Underneath this anatomy

there’s a jaded old avatar weighed down with

each pulse of unfunded cosmic consciousness. 
Erotic robots have already sniffed which way

the wind is blowing, old fashioned pattern

recognition won’t cut it anymore and the

next lubricant shortage could see them back

in the fields picking strawberries. Thankfully,

aesthetic sensibility is not essential. Farming

and gardening are not the same as astronomy.
Alternative Facts, Bad Luck and Bad Timing

left us with an Amateur Hour Adobe After

Effects background and the sound of women

cradling babies in the ruins of a city in the Middle

East. Mostly there are too many pulses to process,

too much acid-wash rhetoric, not even my grooming

accessory can make up for the absence of poetry.