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Monday, April 19, 2010

Brutal Archive [Today's News Poem, April 19, 2010]

Brutal Archive [Today's News Poem, April 19, 2010]
“Little Sofia was dead after being left alone for more than 14 hours, police said Monday.”
– Henry K. Lee, The San Francisco Chronicle, April 19, 2010
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/19/BA241D112O.DTL&tsp=1

Though lost between the network links,
A hidden memory restores.
The sleeper stirs and starts to think:
“I know I've had that dream before...

A baby died within a car—
Where babes are both conceived and tried—
She cooked by sun and slept by stars.
I wept—for was that me inside?

She might have been my daughter, niece,
Or was that me, confined by strap
And tied to iron lungs by piece,
To atrophy inside a trap:

A book upon a shelf inside
A vault beneath the surface world—
Or simply bound to metal rides
That surfed the edge as vortex swirled?

My parents—did they work to death?
Or were they pruned and put within
An archive, paying dreams for breath:
Recalling times of hope and sin

To fund an internet machine that seems
To siphon-off their sparks of nightmare; dream?"

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2 comments:

Obsidian Eagle said...

Respectful treatment of the matter in question while still managing to deliver biting commentary.

I like your prosodic appeals to mass media, your style fits an AntiPoetic rubric:

–adjective
of or pertaining to elements or techniques used in a poem not conventionally thought to be suitable or traditional.

- ItzQuauhtli, Herald of Quetzalcoatl

Khakjaan Wessington said...

Revised.