In the walls, web traffic hums binarily with grief
and our metadata whispers to us no words of consolation.
Some sleepless nights, I open E’s profile and let his light,
like an infinite procession, sink into the sheets.
Our metadata makes exhibitions of our regrets:
01:02:13 disputing motives for his suicide; 00:15:54 spent
saying nothing at all. In the last press conference, as our nation
finally falls, it will be said that our biggest failures
were those private ones. The aunt caught stealing gifts
at the wedding. The friend no one could save.
Our metadata is unable to be embodied. Our bodies
self-immolate to make a point. Not a point as in the line
between two. Not a line as in of thought.
The inanimate reanimates his body. My fingers
graze his information. No one is ready to forgive.
The Very Wide Space Between Certainties
God has built a machine from my own bones.
His motives
are his own business.
The soul? An electromagnetic signal pulsing
from star cluster to star cluster, craving reciprocation.
A ghost ship sailing
along ghost water.
A machine
designed to brush away my fears
like spiders from a child’s hair.
Some say
there is a precise science to it all,
which terrifies me.
Estanislao Lopez is a highschool teacher in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared in Meridian, Mid-American Review, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. contact
