Bryan Coleborne: Two Poems on Technology

Two Poems on Technology

The Pied Piper of Hamilton: Variations on a Danse Macabre

I tap my navi on the screen
And waken its seductive voice:
Turn left, change lanes and bong, school zone,
So forceful as I face a choice

But when I touch it later on
It breaks into exultant song
And gathers cars from round about
Into a vast, metallic throng.

She smiles at all their names and lines,
From Scorpion to Barracuda:
For now I’ve caught you in a sting
My tailpipes have become your leader.

Their drivers watched her from their desks,
Entranced by vision on their phones
Transmitted from the cloudosphere
By flocks of softly whirring drones.

She lured them to a precipice
Where they spun off into a spiral,
The biggest car wash of them all,
With flashing fins as they went viral.

Their bodies crushed in sand and rocks,
They formed a massive reef where eels
And schools of brightly-coloured fish
Swam in and out of alloy wheels.

One car escaped that deadly dive
And made it back to its front door
To tell the tale of all the wrecks
Still bubbling on the ocean floor.

Workmen arrived and took down signs
Which told you what you couldn’t do
And what would happen if you did
By order of the local screw.

The breakfast shows ran out of froth,
The jocks were shocked beyond bombast,
The headlines made a breakdown call,
The talkback kings were flabbergast.

The air now clear, the days were fresh,
The streets were free for walking.
I saw some friends out and about
In the new-found act of talking.

Birdsong broke out in public space
Throughout the newly-planted trees,
And the navi, if you must ask?
She’s sleeping now, but touch her, please.

Bryan Coleborne

Terra Incognita

And gurly grew the sea
—“The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens”

The printer does an extra sheet
With nothing on it, that’s for sure,
Apart from what it has to say,
As you must see, page 4 of 4.

There’s all those watermarks, of course,
The stamp of power on a space
Like compass bearings set for spice,
Just right for when you’re blown off course.

I tap some other lines of text
To print across that empty page
Like sailors’ feet beside the shore,
Another reef, another age.

I hear their stories from afar
Of fabled beast and avatar,
Of winding paths and shining trees,
Which I print out with plastic keys

But they get back to me as fast
As flashing arrows from the past
In dreams I fear to understand
Like waves devouring golden sand

And houses sliding into sea,
Where bears are stranded on the ice
And deserts form in paradise
With flocks of birds no longer free.

So did those breakers on that reef
Destroy the circuit of belief
Between the wheelhouse and the star
To chart the ocean from afar?
And was that sodden ship of fools
So deep within the southern waves
Beyond the limits of the rules
So smashed apart like barrel staves?

And did those tea-leaves on the rocks
Who tossed the captain in the drink
And drifted into drunken wrecks
Imagine there’d be no more ink?

There were no camels, kings or gifts,
No other way for their reverse.
The common theme becomes the ifs,
Which form the current of this verse.

Without a steady, guiding light
Throughout a black and gurly night,
I have to say I must come clean:
This poem broke out of my machine.

Bryan Coleborne