Search Engine
The water wheel of the internet turns
under the weight of the names we pour
into it. Google is a cauldron. We call
to those individuals and things we want
to locate, shouting their names with
our fingers. Search engines point out
to us the many spots in which the truth
hides and exists. All this looking makes
us a forgetful people, and we take it out
on how we talk. I try to carefully address
a whole mess of recipients, concealing
their names from each other, and screw
it up, a wall of atmarks and dot coms
weighing down the ceiling of the email.
I’ll be BCCing you next time, I reassure
them, copying who they are but keeping
them invisible. I’ll tighten the straps
on every attachment, grab onto each
wayward jaypeg and stray doc flapping
in the breeze of the internet. Wherefore
art the anchors in here, this placeless
place where a name is an address.
Google has a lot to answer for, bless its little cotton socks!
ReplyDeleteThis makes me laugh (especially the part about e-mail recipients - I know that kind of mess-up) but it also is profound.
ReplyDeleteOur kids don't give this subject a second thought but I both marvel at and sometimes am in terror of the electronic monster we've created.
There's a lot to this one, H. Water for the water wheel, oil for the engine, however you look at it, the Internet is supposed to expand everyone's worlds, but it's in fact just creating a bigger prison. People once celebrated it's lack of rules, protocol, etiquette, but it seems now that all this freedom of communication is coming with a lot of conditions. And Dave, I'm thinking that Google is wearing something else on its feet.
ReplyDeleteLove the poem & these comments about "monster" and "prison" and how everything is working together with words and image, too!
ReplyDeleteAnd thanks to Dave for a new saying (new to me): "Bless its little cotton socks!"
That image and this poem, a cauldron indeed! Love it, especially the image of weighing down "the ceiling of the email." Very funny!
ReplyDeleteI like the first and last lines. In fact, the poem's a keeper for that time in future where one considers if Google Search Engine was worth it at all. ("Placeless place...). Bravo, H.
ReplyDeleteLove it...only you could describe what happens in the google search engine : )
ReplyDeleteI read this poem yesterday and it entered into a conversation I had last night about the world of information at our fingertips and all the ways we have of connecting via social platforms, and yet we see so much spinning of wheels, indirect and non-communication.
ReplyDelete"All this looking makes us a forgetful people"
This is something I think about as someone who posts poems. I hope to produce one potent enough to sink below a person's skin, yet readers today fly from page to page so fast it's hard to imagine anyone remembering anything - poems as "momentary memory", as you put it. But I think it's safe to say I'll remember your search engine poem for awhile.