there is less than nothing left. No books unread in an attic to diminish particle by particle by heat and spider prayer. No shoes to rot tongueless on melted stands. Or photographs returning to the darkness from whence they came. In the end all is for-gotten and never happened. Nothing remains and rightly so. In another end we turn to face a setting sun foolishly certain that either will rise again. Or brush our teeth with enameled confidence in the fact of tomorrow. We risk future attacks by driverless cars, made of space-age hardened plastic. We hear the moan of drones, the whine of digitized data parsing as our lives, the algorithms that have somehow been programmed to replace us, and can only hope there is an exit at the end.
Richard Weaver hopes to one day to once again volunteer with the Maryland Book Bank, CityLit, and return as writer-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub. Other pubs include: Loch Raven R, Dead Mule, Shoreline of infinity, Little Patuxent R, Rat’s Ass Review, & Mad Swirl. He’s the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press, 1992). Recently, his 190th prose poem was published under a checker-board cone of silence.