Sunday, April 10, 2011

Early To Bed

Wrote this poem a week or two ago. It's about memory, individual and collective, deteriorating over time. I just read the book "Feed" by M.T. Anderson for my Young Adult Literature course at WWU. It's a sci-fi novel in which those who can afford it have a computer hardwired into their limbic system. This computer, called the feed, can record and share memories as a complete sensory experience (much like the Pensieve in Harry Potter but digital, not magic). When one of the characters has a malfunction with their feed, that character looses a year of memory. Have you ever been disturbed because you couldn't remember something? What are ways that our memories can affect our thinking? History (collective memory) seems to dissolve over the years just like specific memories from the day (individual memory) dissolve away at night. Technology may allow us to record memory, but could an artificial memory ever replace a real memory? Is the memory or the experience more important, more true? We can't ever experience something directly, only through the senses, and the senses often lie. Anyway, my mind is working on interesting questions.



Early To Bed

i'm early to bed, dear reader.
early for the birds sitting on branches
who die as i close my eyes.

The scum in the toilet is what you think.
I think of roman viaducts while i wash my hands.
the sounds on the street are seeping through
the drywall to my eardrum. boom. boom. boom.

In sleep the daily image is dissected,
memory scratched like a scab.
So many claws inside this head.
So much forgotten, early to bed.

1 comment:

  1. I like it, especially the roman viaducts while I wash my hands part :) I had an immediate visual of the kind of bathroom one would be in if they were to look outside an see a viaduct. Random, I know...

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