All my forms

All your base
are in the past and
all my forms
are obsolete –
whacked out
gone
typeface
with contrived line
breaks – on the
Olivetti owned
by the immigrant family
before us
who gave up and left,
or hand-addressed envelopes
stuffed with A4 printouts
and worries over
what if it doesn’t get there
cos of my bad handwriting;
or on a little rigid square
called a ‘floppy disk’
hand-delivered to the
student magazine, composed in
the HSBC computer lab
air thickened by rattling keyboards
and Lynx body spray
while you carved off pure slices
of your very soul or
wrote cantos ironically like an asshole;
or the ones emailed
to Steve Braunias
in postgraduate terror;
he replies: ‘These were quite good
I almost published one of them’
they were both about Edward Said;
or the ones with html tags
linking to another dead
service for holding images
captured like thrashing animals
by a device that
only does one thing, only one thing –
Or group emails from an address
auto-deleted without trace,
no way of reminding you
what year or decade you lost track
of life and death feelings –
or fleeting life morsels exchanged
for entire tiny hearts, fisting
thumbs sticking
or threads of sounds
that emerge from small
flocks of birds, an eyeless
tongueless maelstrom
gibbering and scritching
and boxed up posting
and chimpanzees smoking
the whole fascism at once
all my apes
gone
in the face
but the butts
what, ‘what
thou lovest well
remains’
if you can hold onto it
if you can just find
the page.