i'm told pop was obsessed with his high-school yearbook

so much that he went back to work on it after he retired

stuck in the past, but in a harmless sort of way

this, coming from my dad, whose antique radio collection

doubles as the family’s heirloom furniture

i think about this,

putting on my bright orange half-polyester k-mart shirt

collar reaching halfway to the armpit,

which caught my eye at the stall of a flea market vendor

the past is so remarkably rich with detail

so much of it unspeakably unknown to me

the reason for me going to the flea market to begin with

to find the forgotten artist’s geometric needlework

the broken betamax camcorder

the array of postmodern nightstand lamps 

made by a famous '80s nightstand lamp designer

what little information i can glean from these far-off years

thanks to websites left untouched since the 2000s

cataloging all that humanity has to offer

and all expressed in a heartbeat, here and now

which, by the way, is the problem:

every present as it cannibalizes future

becomes more and more massive

all-encompassing, and not only that

but reflected, in the not-walled-but-mirrored garden

bulging and swelling, infected by constant access

representing the whole picture 

so that now it’s impossible to focus on any point 

without noticing something happening mere pixels away

attempted shorter: it is a bird’s eye view of reality 

at least the distant past has already been transferred

into the domain of memory

the witnesses culled down to a manageable size

the speakers an even smaller number

so that when we make a query about a specific day

decades gone

the results form a honest-to-god look-at-able portrait

not of reality but of memory

still, there's the problem of conflating this with desire

wanting to superimpose its curve

onto the eternal jagged edge of the present

(carlotta valdez…)

but then again, desire’s always the problem

except, disturbingly, in this present

where it has become drowsiness

what was once a job for critics/curators/editors

deciphering the current picture

is now a job for algorithms

and i yawn at the thought of their expression

at least people sheltered their own biases

in the realm of “opinion”

they sewed their famous names

into the curves of their stories

and cults of personality formed

testing their central nodes for humbleness and foresight

i shudder to think of the distant future now

and what mess of a distant past it will be left with

as storage expands

the possibility of stowing away the present emerges

and, in its wake, the consequence: blindness

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