My computer speaks to me,
talks in text upon a screen
—“Just a moment, it says,” but it lies.
Its circle of ho-hum, la-de-da dots rotates mid-screen
in blue field as if Windows-10 was on a beach
in Key West sucking up sun and sea air
making a fool of yours-truly who waits,
as Estragon does for Godot, as if I had
nothing better to do but muse, whiling life away,
waiting for some ineffable number in C-drive’s bowels,
a single switch among millions in an algorithm, to flip,
but which is, instead, at this moment,
loafing ’round the break room in an atomic trance
sipping a mug of electrons, lolling among capacitors,
waiting to be zapped up-side its chip by the
resuscitation crew —Control, Alt, and Delete,
coded to jog numerical beats back to life
a-la heart paddles, to get Dell back to work
to load his flat rectangular universe of pixels
staring blankly at me from my desk
with the info I need to move on,
to get my thoughts in order,
to close this file!
But W-10’s halo of circumambulating dots
goes on without mercy, orbiting nothing,
dead center on my screen while I
cool my heels waiting while reading
(with one eye ever on the screen) Vaclav Smil’s
equally intricate celtic-knot of numbers,
namely, his book, “How the World Really Works”
hoping I’ll learn, if nothing else, simple acceptance,
hoping I’ll learn to relax despite awareness
that our local reality behaves, with insane regularity,
like my computer, forcing me to wait
Jim Culleny, © 01/25/23
Blink 