poem || Erik Moshe

A DATAMINER’S JOURNAL

I am bRoadcasting to you, as always, from a chorus of geodes
Which, yOu may not know, are the building blocks for up and coming
Earth program-Litmus testers wanting to take up the mantle of parental wisdom
Knowing your eccEntricities, from a foreign data cloud:
A terabyte warehouse’s equivalent of Lebanon where it rained tetrahedrons
I held an umbrella, cringing at the pattering that must’ve been memorable,
like the time I prank phone called the police at age 5, [got caught]
Or all those times I would pick My nose and hide my booger-stash
behind the couch cushions, a goo Of depressed green colors like a Macintosh interface
wonder what happened to that infamously oDorant couch…
And we didn’t have dogs or cats, only phish, for unknown rEasons
The swimming pool of information in the backyard, was pleasantLy extracted
The patio tiles red like software error messages
where the sun don’t shine, during National Computer Menstruation Month

To my dad,
Following global trends has always been a hub of mine, as a boy
who frequently skipped Hebrew school, trying to attain a better understanding
of algorithmic Sanskrit, something to recite on those family holidays
when we gathered around the Menorah (or plugged in the electrical one
on the window sill) the intent was genuine, an 8-pointed treatise on
religious digitalia never published, only reminisced on, passed over
like the eyes of the divorce lawyer when ink met paper, the ENTER key
Hit on the next chapter of our PDF file lifeline, as ESCAPE was pressed
At exactly the same moment that you denounced your marriage vows
with mother, or “ema” so they say; I cannot say I took the previous logs
for granted, as having a chief consultant in the house of the male stature
as a young boy was missed. 365’s denominated; I clicked around with a mouse
that lacked a central laser-point, and sometimes clicked the wrong links
Familiarization with parent s e p a r a t i o n took more than counseling
Child support was a constantly recurring update, but the trips to Israel
The land of our heritage where my grandparents migrated to (ctrl-alt-history)
were temporary, a welcome vista in an oasis that was not quite
Origin was Iraq, where rumor has it, wives were traded for livestock
which made sense, considering the bond of that side of the family
could be compared to fortified leather, left in the sun at Rishon le Zion

To whom this may concern,
Acquirements by soul searching aren’t easy lessons, as they lack ceilings
rooftops, units of measurement, making declarations that I was a “dreamer”
who preferred to mull over an object rather than quantify its contents
Needless to say, taking over your business analytics was not my calling
I was a boy who was more interested in the intricacies of a Buddhist’s attic
Than the chronology of an acid wash; those virus scans conducted on
air conditioners when the summer heat caused necks to wrinkle from sweat
I met and learned and interacted, but wasn’t trained for those formatted jobs
Working with my hands was, at times, disastrous--could’ve been equated
to a caveman operating on a biomechanical arm using his teeth as tools
So I tried, but thought better of it, scrolling down to another profession
while a sister program attempted to take up the tradition of filtered oxygen
Nostalgia is a pop up icon most welcome in our mind eye interface
Always Allow, I say, as you and I tube to another multi-dimension
considering a father and son’s data relationship, seeing the lineage secure