Smoke from Mexico

Here is one of the poems I wrote in 2000 which was included in the ACCAnthology Volume 1

Later I fed it to a speech synthesizer... [if you like that sort of thing... let me know I'll post a link to the mp3]

It's a cyberpunk in a small red capsule... a bit of free association and skewed plot...

A spoken-word by synthesized voice MP3 is available HERE

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Smoke from Mexico

Smoke from Mexico
Or maybe some Cloud from Bogata
or stolen memories from that desolate Lab
Outside 
Las Cruces, was it?

I don't really remember any more

I can't say what I want
Cos the memories are sealed

Yeah. They got to me.

It was not that hard.
If they want you
They'll get you.

Don't believe me?
Try to run when 
they've got your number.

The name is in the Database
The one you want.
She is alive.

They'll have erased me 
by the time you read this.
So don't come looking.
There won't be anything left to save.

I hear there is a shortage 
of major organic subsystems

never did like dealing bio-logics
didn't understand
how they could unravel a brain 
and reassemble it into a q-dot 'face.

Hear you're hunting him again.
good luck
Its the self that you don't know
that always spoils it.

You know that voice
you hear
there in the back of your mind 

the one that speaks to you
when you pick up the phone
and dial tone does not answer

the jarring sense that the escalator
should be moving
and it's not.

white noise.

the voice that sounds 
too much like the voice
you'd imagine Death to have.

A regen transformer
causes it to reverberate 
its well modulated ravings
like a long, long distance call
a hollow one-way rant

annoying beyond belief.

It's always *that* voice that tells you 
that you really bent over 
too far this time
this time they'll get you.

I know 
I'm rambling.
comes from having 
too much to think about 
and too little time

At least for now 
I can look out across 
the polluted water 
And see it 
see it rise like 
the life I have lived
Black, Billowing, Bellicose

I started there and I finished there.

What kind of life do you have
when it is only
a poetic fragment?
a snippet of code
easily rendered by an RNA sequencer?

What sense of truth is there?
The mathematics of billowing smoke
is more etherial and more beautiful 
that seeing the cloud itself.
But it can't be explained.

Why did I do those things?
Why did I leave you behind?

Look. 
Can you see the equation now?
I wasn't much of a Dad.
Hell I wasn't much of a human being.
but I left you where 
at least *I* 
wouldn't destroy you

The Smoke is changing to gray now
They've got some water to it.
I won't be here much longer
They'll come 
and that will be that.

What was that equation
Outside 
Las Cruces?

Or in the Cloud from Bogota?

A child?

A tear?

A sorrow I cannot undo?

I'd ask your forgiveness
but
The wind has changed 
I am finally lost
in gray
Smoke from Mexico