QWERTY/AZERTY, etc.
A(nother) poem about my love-hate relationship with computers / office workstations / man-machine interfaces / the power-tools of white-collar work.
Keystrokes whip, clack, snare. Dust bunnies fret and tremble. Silverfish dart from the hardware. Dustmotes dance to the drone of cooling fans. My heart snaps to, shoots up-gullet, hits palate & I’m no entomologist but that thing scuttle-slanting across the workstation has no place in a healthy work environment. Rattle-type: I'd like to speak to the manager. Please send in all the cleaning ladies to bleach epoxied pine, linoleum, thermoplastic casings. Rattle-type: This is not a habitable environment. Snap to: a wisp of smoke. Not smoke, dust. Not dust. Spores. Parasites. Biological contaminants. Snap to: the noise, whip-crack rattle of foreign fingers with alien flavours of skin, spittle, sebum—is that (?) blood plasma, marrow, hemoglobin, let's break for lunch & the café tilts under the assault of lip-smacking, explosive shatters of cutlery, minute orgiastic grunts, & anxiety the anxiety like a slug that salts itself, thriving in its own bile, coating itself in adversity. Teaching me to be water. Be rock. Be both. Be the Om you wish to see in the world. Be the sound of a Japanese water feature. Be the round, flat hum of a supersonic jet thruster. Snap to: the keys, the Keys, The Keys clack-marching with their totalitarian straight backs, sans-serif alphanumeric characters faded like army jackets worn by hippies in peacetime. Rattle-type: Send help. I’m trapped in a public place & the ambulance I decided not to call blares dully in the distance, a faded heartbeat, the Doppler effect of its passage behind my sternum and back out again. Snap to: the ant—is that (?) a scouting ant tweezing the air, lone soldier and atomic physicist. Boot-strike: that must be your army I hear at the gates. Rattle-type: this is my unconditional surrender.
Here we go again with the complaining. If you enjoyed this, you may like this other vent-poem I wrote around the same time… I have plenty of nerve-jangling, sorta-kinda-meta-writing about writing, work, and writing work, like this poetic prose piece, and also this one…
Creative expression is amongst other things a vent, a pressure release valve, and the cortisol fueling the engine is a cumulative force, a repetitive strain, so it’s only natural that I tend to repeat myself. We tend to vent about the same things over and over, struggling to change our ways even once we have broken free of the external circumstances that (we thought) shackled us to this or that behaviour.
Sometimes it turns out the shackles are internal, a comfort, a familiar weight.
After the digital overload of the COVID lockdowns, digital detoxing is on everyone’s lips. As a freelancer who sells words, I will always have one foot (when it’s not both) in digital spaces, but now more than ever I feel a hunger to just be in physical space with other living creatures.
Even as machines become increasingly intrinsic to our survival, we must take space and regulate how we interface with them, how they drive our behaviour.
If the shackles are internal, then the keys must be somewhere inside us as well.
TL;DR: I wish you well in your escalating arms race with all the devices you depend on for survival.
This is eminently relatable (not that I'd ever have thought to put it the same way) whilst also uniquely expressive - the snap backs between different kinds of minutae, mundane or visceral, are brilliant.
Single tasking is indeed often that hard-to-attain, hard-to-maintain key.
You materially changed some minds with that prayer of yours "To say the right words". That was then. And now you are miserating outloud? We'll see if haunting people is charitable, I like it, it is like an answer to the question what are you ignoring by being online? Well, what indeed lies out of reach of our scrapyard graveyard? Hurray for the bugs, yuppy. I only want to add that Eshlemann, the second half of his career would sit on his notes for poems for a year. And why not? Nobody is rattling our windows for today's (underlined_)poam. Maybe if we deliver it dry as white dgsht , everyone can relax. Idk! Of course, I will drag one out from last Jan, conduct that experiment. Youall know i could use the cashe of irony, "wldn't it be nice if we were older/ Then we wldnt have to work so hard..."