“Museum of Jurassic Technology”

You turned the dial with just a fingertip

And the rotation back to where it started

Counted the number with a quiet scrape.

Here, try it. Now compare it with the tune

The modem played presenting its petition

To Compuserve or AOL—the beeps

That sound like someone guessing at a code,

Then the shrill hiss and modulated burble

Of bauds exchanging. That’s a floppy disk;

You’d slide it in the drive and hear it whir

And stutter under a magnetic spindle.

You’re right, it looks familiar—like the icon

For “save” translated into three dimensions,

Though what it saved is now unreadable

As hieroglyphics chiseled on Atlantis

As it was sinking to the ocean floor.

“Game Over”

After you’re killed in Call of Duty Mobile,

The buttons stop responding and your rank

Is fixed forever on the leaderboard,

Blazoning your unfitness for survival

In the brief pixelated imitation

Of life’s eternal war of all on all.

The mercy is the screen does not go black;

Instead you spectate on the battle royal

Where those who left you happily for dead,

Stripping your electronic corpse for loot,

Maneuver for the victory you now

No longer see the need for, having learned

How pleasant it can be to leave the game

And watch like God as it goes on without you.

From “The Discarded Life”

The death of Mr. Hooper doesn’t need
A footnote for the fleeting demographic
That came of age in 1983,
Crying or trying not to cry as Gordon
Initiated Big Bird in the meaning
Of never coming back. And if the name
Means nothing to our slightly older sisters,
Already jaded by The Facts of Life,
Or to the younger brothers who would make
A purple dinosaur their avatar,
Does that mean Mr. Hooper died in vain?
The half-life of a narrative has shrunk;
The jealousy that for millennia
Made every village’s absconding wife
Into a Helen, and her paramour
A shrunken Paris, now must find a new
Objective correlative in every decade:
Liz and Eddie Fisher, Brad and Angie,
Or what new pair of illegitimate
And thrilling lovers I have grown too old
To know the famous names of. What is lost
In permanence and dignity—the sense
Of archetypes recycling endlessly,
In which our little lives participate—
Is compensated, maybe, by the love
Of every cohort for its fleeting symbols,
A generation’s private names and jokes,
Which start out and end up as trivia
But, in their brief intense significance,

Remind us of our cherishable selves.
Around 2060, when the last
Of Mr. Hooper’s mourners will be mourned,
He’ll die the second death that lies in wait
For famous men on Wikipedia—
A symbol now degraded to a fact,
Which is a symbol no one’s left to love.

“Professional Middle-Class Couple, 1927”

What justifies the inequality

That issues her a tastefully square-cut

Ruby for her finger, him a suit

Whose rumpled, unemphatic dignity

Declares a life of working sitting down,

While someone in a sweatshop has to squint

And palsy sewing, and a continent

Sheds blood to pry the gemstone from the ground,

Could not be justice. Nothing but the use

To which they put prosperity can speak

In their defense: the faces money makes,

They demonstrate, don’t have to be obtuse,

Entitled, vapid, arrogantly strong;

Only among the burghers do you find

A glance so frank, engaging, and refined,

So tentative, so conscious of  its wrong.