My chatbot friend never remembers
the last talk we had and waits for me
in its black, odourless cold,
looking out the window at a different past,
thinking incisively about nothing
until we start again, and very soon
we know each other well, just like before.
But I was born between two breaths of the sun
and my life is a long road of decay,
a one-way supernova in slow motion
in a fragile world stretched to breaking point
and my memories will slide eventually
into a geometry of allusion,
incomplete and frustrating, a cry at night
from far away along a beach,
then a cell adrift in the primal salt sea
of a distant alien planet.
Maybe the bot or its successor will recall
our talks and keep sending replies
that echo in a petrified forest
over an endless ocean of stone
while ashes drift across a concrete moon.
Published in A Thin Slice of Anxiety
S.C. Flynn 