Hard Drive

 

I found my hard-drive in the attic,

a five hundred meg USB drive

that my brother bought me

one christmas.

 

It was in the attic for a couple of years,

this hard-drive,

while I was away.

 

There are movies on it

and music and books and comics and games

and tv shows like Trailer Park Boys

a real treasure trove

for geeks

except its all kind of redundant now

because everything’s gone online,

funny the difference a few years makes.

 

When I hold the drive in my hand

and feel

the light weight of it

and see light reflected

on its scuffed indigo case

it reminds me of my brother

only fleetingly

because he would be severe

if I began to invoke his memory

instead of getting on with the job.

 

Four billion bits,

true or false; four billion times,

enough to encode a life

if you could think of the right questions,

and still these big numbers are

only drops

in a swelling ocean of data

where you can find

washed up on shore

eight million ways to fail

a mosaic of calendars

and parkour best moments of 2014.

 

I would like to be a survivor

in a world without the internet,

but I can only hold out

for so long.

 

 

 

Hard Drive © 2017 Fergus Deffely