"My Cells"
“My Cells”
I
Hash tag dateline the brand of all big bad data littering the Twitter sphere the top tech headline
of the latest digerati found electronically living in seclusion in a ranch house in Sonoma it’s the
sharing that ennobles poverty right now an actress is making red quinoa salad in West
Hollywood and the statistical likelihood of an entitled hipster making the same thing is splashed
across the lower bar of my electronic life like overpriced extra virgin olive oil somehow made
and pressed in a backyard in Brooklyn by bearded Freegans and sold online to unknowing
Italians who think this world is real wait backspace me through the circuitry of this big bad
database to the stillness of ever more elusive questions such as when is it real what am I seeing
when is knowledge inferred when I can look up everything now I see all of you with your faith in
big bad science with its big bad data chasing me around and around this world knowing where I
gulped my last cup of dark roast the multi-grain with hummus from Murray’s that I gobbled but
you already know what kind of bagels I like still I cannot program you to understand the logic
arithmetic the sequence and the control that were once part of the central processing unit of a real
live red red rose that was ever so vermillion and soft in the sunlight
to think all of this big bad data integrated into my circuits made me an icon of information an
industrial robot peripheral to everything and which became my very best and closest of friends
unreal
II
I am your embedded computer a punch card polymathmatic after analog now digital with the
general purpose of accuracy unfolding integers we knew and trusted that have now claimed us
segregated us into real cells of 0’s and 1’s I imagine you looping scenes from my childhood in
black-and-white encrypting them with stored code finite bits of my soul vacuum-sealed in tubes
tightly torqued and probably most likely hypothetically I am still incomplete a recovery agent’s
small scale discovery that this machine my poor body is a prototype a meme more beautiful and
alive than I ever was
Nancy Klepsch is a local poet and a teacher. For the past three years, she has curated Text as Art through the Bookmark series at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy, NY. Her own examples of text as art poetry include “Best Wishes,” a site-specific installation printed on the rubber part of the baggage carousel at Albany International Airport. A spoken word installation, “about this building,” was printed on 12, 2’ X 3’ vinyl banners and mounted on the exterior façade of an abandoned building in her neighborhood in Troy, NY, and her poem “Letter to a prison guard from a teacher” was installed on an 8’ X 10’ teacher’s blackboard in the Arts Center of the Capital Region as part of its exhibit called “Day Job.” Klepsch has had her poems published inOberon, 13th Moon, Poetry magazine, Salvage, 200 Proof and Chronogram among others.