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Overloading the Machine

Loved Poem No. 3

quoting Matt Langley

"set out from color"
but found a boundary

at best, a fallen fence
at worst, weeds grown
at heart,

in our hands
there stood difference
the same under

a dive, a swim,
a pocket full
of flailing house keys
pairs of prankster
car keys we didn't hide
well enough

but we went far
from a certain date,
we may never—

made it
look shiny, past dents
spit and polish,
all the troubles
smearing by

against a fence but maybe
time, no guards to say,
step there, that's
the wrong way

hoarse with certainty
I knew—

I know
but where we started
a shoulder overlooked
the pattern we see,
"set out from color."

Our culture no longer bothers to use words like appropriation or borrowing to describe those very activities. Today's audience isn't listening at all - it's participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.

-- William Gibson

This page was last modified on 2011 December 20. "Loved Poem No. 3" by John Sullivan is Copyright ©2003 - 2011, and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.