Waste Archives as Landscape
Waste Archives as Landscape
The landfill blooms in layers.
A geological cross section of obsolete promises.
VHS tape unspools through rainwater like black linguine.
Floppy disks soften into strange vinyl lilies.
A thousand family photos sleep inside CD-Rs gone bronze with disc rot,
their aluminum freckles oxidized into weather.
Under six feet of compacted fast food wrappers and drywall dust,
a dead Zip drive still remembers a tax return from 1998.
No machine alive nearby can ask it questions.
Bit rot sounds gentle.
Like apples surrendering quietly in a cellar.
But it is magnetic drift, binder decay, electrons leaking from trapped cells,
memory turning feral molecule by molecule.
The earth keeps our backups badly.
Tape sheds oxide into mud.
DAT cartridges crack like old knuckles.
Hard drives drown with perfect posture.
The century builds mountains from abandoned formats,
and calls them progress.
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This ekphrastic was inspired by the above image and shared with DVerse Poets Pub.
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I really like this. Lots of tech just goes to rot. Well done.
ReplyDelete"Abandoned formats" nicely described!
ReplyDelete"Developed world" means we get to hide our landfills as efficiently as death, or send it to the "developing" to recycle those "feral molecules" of memory. Wonder if the aliens who eventually will encounter dead Earth will find its outer carapace the "abandoned format" of trashed sapience.
ReplyDeleteA strong and precise write Chris - a sad garden indeed. Excellent 👏
ReplyDeleteI loved the obsolencent backstorries and the anthropomorphing of items like this classic, "a dead Zip drive still remembers a tax return from 1998." Well done!
ReplyDeleteThat is what interesting pile of trash. At least parts of lives reduced to rubbish. Great, but sad poem.
ReplyDeleteKind of a high tech take on matters of life and death, decadence and decay.
ReplyDeleteIndeed... and maybe also the words we are writing now.... and maybe to some extent there is a bliss that some things just dissapears.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely, totally, unbelievably epic poetry!!!!!!! You brought the landfill to life, as overwhelming as it felt.
ReplyDeleteThis is stupendous, Chris! Loved the similes.
ReplyDeleteYou had me at, "VHS tape unspools through rainwater like black linguine."
ReplyDelete