my computer
DESCRIPTION
a duende digital broadside for 2012 . . .TRANSCRIPT
My Computer
larry goodell
My Computer
I Live for My Computer(2012, from Rain Drain)
Computer(written at Bernalillo High School 1982
while in the Poetry In The Schools program)
Computer Illiterates of the Stone Age Speak Up(1991, from Fugitive ABC’s)
I Live For My Computer
I live for my computer
and my computer lives for me!
but my computer’s name is not Gertrude,
or Rosy-bottom, although it is red and has been known
to repeat itself
my computer’s name is Guts –
Oh wait, that’s too close to Gus
and everyone around here knows that Gus
had a way about taking over
I’m not about to let a box of metal & odd parts
which takes all too long to warm up
take over and tell me what to do although, increasingly
I ask it to do just that
and should there be a name for a machine that has crashed
given me days of agony
problems too many to mention with programs that wouldn’t work
operating system that’s incompatible with what I need to do
start-up failures deletes that could cause a heart attack
crashes, blank screens, evil dialog boxes
and error messages with numbers you can’t find out what’s the matter
when the whole thing’s frozen, but mostly
I depend on it most of my day and much of the night
as I happily send messages off to the cloud
cloud one, cloud two, cloud three
or shall it be cloud four today
while something in that evil tomorrow says
“I could pull the plug anytime
just the right solar flare
an earth devastation, just a government
with nerds employed to kill you
not only spy and send you to prison
but jam your ones and zeros”
So how can I name something that might do me in
or be the tool that takes every cent I have saved
to some asshole somewhere and there goes
what little ease I have left in life –
ugh. why do I use this thing, oh, I forgot,
I live for my computer and, supposedly, it is for me
but the one thing it doesn’t have, as I look above
are nine dancing women, one of whom speaks to me.
COMPUTER
computer
astuter
fast duty
a tutor
Rasputin
hard tutor
mass tutor
horn tooter
past tooter
corn pewter
fast tooter
past tooter
past pewter
fine pewter
con pewter
con tutor
corn tucker
come pewter
con tutor
comb tutor
comb tucker
can tucker
cone tutor
cone tucker
comb pewter
comb pucker
Tom pucker
Tom Tucker
pom cuter
pom toot her
calm toot her
calm boot her
bomb toot her
bomb boot ‘er
palm cuter
bomb cuter
bum tooter
bum beater
come titter
compute her
come sitter
consider
bum titter
computer
some titter
some pewter
come titter
computer
come pitter
comb patter
comb tutor
computer
com-
pute her
computer
bum tutor
computer
bum tutor.
Computer Illiterates of the Stone Age Speak Up
"I dont like spending so much timein front of that sky bone thingand my fingers dont work on its little finger padsit's purty but it has a foreign lookand if it tells me what to doI'll beat it to smitherines.I got bones, I got rocks: its it's sky-lightning big eyethat's always changing I don't trust,we'll put it in the back of a cavewith it's eye out to wait for tomorrow:I got things to do."
Larry Goodell was born in Roswell, New Mexico —
where crossing cattle trails meet the Pecos River
and outer space visitors. He lives with his wife Lenore, photographer
and phenologist, on the northern edge of the Sandia Mountains in
Placitas Village.
http://about.me/larrygoodell
a duende digital broadside for 2012
COLOPHON
Set in MS Reference Sans Serif,
based on the Verdana fonts created by Matthew Carter
who with Mike Parker set up Bitstream Inc. in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, the first independent American company to
manufacture digital type.
My Computer
larry goodell