Its jumper pins pulled out,
from currency removed,
this slab becomes dead weight
between your moving hands.
Paperback thick at most
but smooth and dense with glass,
ceramic and rare earth:
a cache of detail, spent.
In files and folders viewed
as list – with icon, tile
and content organised
to ascend or descend,
by name and date and type
according to your whim –
the stuff you thought you knew.
Or once upon, felt need to.
For we’re held hostage now,
afraid to be forgetting;
though this magnetic coat –
written on by arm’s length head,
then via spun mirrors read –
is not how memory works.
Secret contexts lie beneath
the surface marks we leave.
Our web of recollection,
fertile with unknown ties –
circumstance becomes remade
each time we draw on it.
Choose well the threads you weave,
the clues you carry forward:
capacity can’t be
relied on, still less foretold.
ii. 2019
