digital ghosts // poem

databases, mainframes, algorithms

thinking of you, love.
haunted by digital ghosts —
presences remembered
both in organic memory
and in code.

databases, mainframes,
more than a graveyard:
a place for false whispers,
meaningless nothings
to pass before me
like a holographic spectre.

the cloud has you now,
though your body is laid away.
elsewhere, in the same earth
cables carry echoes of you
to my screens again.
what sour irony.

accounts, profiles, impressions,
the beats of a butterfly wing —
brought you here, though
you’re not here.
nothing more
than a whim of the algorithm.
a trick of the light,
played on a weary mind.

but the binary doesn’t know
your laugh.
it doesn’t know the way
you move in your sleep.
it doesn’t know the person
I loved.

it just puppets her face
and mimics her voice.

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image credit: On the Terrace (1904) by Stanislav Zhukovsky