Ode to the Computer Dead

For Allen Tate, by Nik Hoffmann

Suddenly in the grips of night, howling
Lurid curses along the arc of the moon,
When Death is deep in her wearied cups,
My heart is rent, pierced by a florid dart.
I go, center-front my computer screen		
To enter the bustling, ivy-gated yard
Of jagged angel wings on broken tombs,
And search down the line of weathered graves,
Each name I know—dreams of a man who's dead.

As like a dream conceives its own 
Secret dream, and asks upon awake,
Who are the dead?

Front lit, the flaming glow reflected off my cheeks,
Radiantly agleam amid the brown then black 
Of the light’s absence, retracted back into the moon.
As like the mirror of lunar candescence, inverted,  
My dilated eye, reviewing widely the monuments
On display, impermanently rooted in digital earth,
The stones but planted in throes of harnessed light,
Contacts and chips keeping tight hold of the wire reigns,
Pulling back with uncaring abuse, absent in flesh,
Unknowing the greater expanse beyond logic’s unreason.

In chorus with those who carry knowledge
Into the living, immortal heart, we ask,
Who are the dead?

There I sit, instruments in hand, rapt with divination, 
Flicking Fortuna's wheel, tracking the mousepad,
Flurry of fleeting keys, spacebar's heart-throb thump,
And off I've gone, strolling down the column's length,
Small faces in plaques nestled in the dying grass,
My eyes, my screen—the sentinel of their memory.
Small voices summoned from their aching deaths,
Coaxed from the grotto of wandering shades,
They tease me with ghost dance at graveyard’s ball,
And taunt me with their mausoleum's rest;
Each whisper is lightning among the urns,
And when I burn, I fall like ash among the ash.

And wandering like a child among half-acre tombs,
Lost and ignorant, echoing as the demoniac 
In sorrow’s chains, Who are the dead? 

Strewn across the desktop field,
Icon littered, in peach blossom coat,		 
Stretched limbs, patched bleak with bone pale,	
The sheer remnants of anguished minds,
Grudged phantoms of torrid fear and trembling lust.
Pixels degrade, a web of lichen overspread
And burst, without well-wrought confines restraining		
The subtle, finely spun spirits rushing athwart		
Circuitous clasps of wavering love and unlove,
The granite hewn and pitted slabs open
And closing at whim of prompted command.

As like gossamer shreds will flee
Our grasp in springtime’s wind,
Who are the dead?

Though lovers pound	the coffins of our loves, 	
I haven't heart enough to crack the heavy lids,
And let the revenants catch their breath
To haunt my solitary dreams again;
Or love them back to life once more,
Imbibing cold kisses, now long embalmed,
To taste the poison in their thin gray lips.
Cut apart, them and I, by walls of the bounding box,
Walls without windows in windows without walls,
The screen buries all, fading away in their plots,
Are there they laid, or only stored in memory?

As like a fiend who searches tomes, frantic,
Looking for ways of necromancy,
Who are the dead?

Dead or nay, it matters not when the demons rise,
When Lady Death rides out her harem
Of the compiled, indexed, blind-deaf dead,
Like the single face of a thousand crowd,
They look without sight, though I look at them,
I see without been seen, and know them,
And they know not me, voyeur of the digital dead.
The faces linger after death and still before,
They linger alive on the flat black slate,
And burn their visage faint upon the void;
This world encased in the electric grave,	
Running there dead on top my desk.
I press my face into the keys and cry, 	
Who are the dead? Who are the dead?