Thursday, February 16, 2012

Cracker Jack Prizes

Shake your finger in my face.
Tsk, tsk! Shame on me!
Disapprove of my decision
To believe in fairy tales.
Rearrange my sock drawer
With the stitching facing north
Rows of six and eight and two
Rarely ever worn.
Toss a beanbag through the hole.
Ding, ding! Winner!
Cheap toys and styrofoam.
Cracker Jack prizes.
Hang on. Don't breathe.
Hold your breath for a sec
While we figure out
Where this diamond came from.
Lecture me one more time.
Buzz! Final answer!
It's worth finding out.
I'm willing to be wrong.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

A click, a buzz, a whir. A misplaced finger on some unknown combination of keys, and zap, bang bing…it appeared. No intention here. Simply sending off some mindless email about some mindless problem.

But, here it was…eyes struggled to see, my mind struggled to decipher…Where is that God damned Rosetta Stone? With the liquidity of an incessant struggle, the letter fell into words, words into ideas...you can see where this is going. The heart dropped.

Text from a time not too long ago, from a place not too far away, the emails laid bare once again a voice. Damn…I can still conjure your voice!!!!! But, something happed…I read one, then two, and Jikers!!!! The wind carried them off in a stream of electronic hide and seek.

Of course, now the game was on!!! Where were they hiding???? I scoured, searched, looked under, dug deep, and persistence as a verb not a noun paid dividends. I found where the buggers had been hiding for some many years. Quietly they sat; some fragment of a mistake in coding perhaps. They should never have been. An error in software? A Ghost in the machine? I swear…I know I deleted, purged, burned, and flushed everything. There was confident that there was “no sanctuary”.

Regardless, I set about carefully reading every letter, every word, and every line. Hours past, then days…there must have been 4-dozen, covering 2011-2013; some slice of a narrative, found after the preface, and before the prologue.

They are gone now. No longer 0s or 1s. No binary coding of a conversation back and forth between two souls. I had sorted, catalogued, and read them…all of them. And, carefully placed the pieces back into a picture; no, a short-story.

I cast them out, threw them into the proverbial computer fire pit, not for anger or malice, or disparaging thoughts. I picked up, dropped, and then pressed the “Rinse” button, out of hurt, out of regret, out of things not explained / not dealt with, pain inflicted, beliefs destroyed, out of responsibilities not taken, out of sorrow, out of an apology not provided.

They are in the universe somewhere…maybe still in here somewhere, waiting to again appear in future accidents of fate.

There was something in an email though, something I slipped into my pocket…a bridge…a link. It brought me here.