Sunday of algorithms

The poet's at work.

He's sleeping through the best part of the day, a day he so desires to say something good about.

Oblivion makes no promises, there's no contract, yet it feels right to close his eyes and drift off when others are out and about.

Then he rubs his eyes, and it's just like being awake.

He's grateful for the work and especially for the job he's been assigned: to resist gravity for the rest of his life.

This means, to him and him only, that he must walk more uprightly. And close the back door tightly.

It's allright to stop for coffee and to go into a bookstore or two along the way, even though bookstores never have what he wants. If he's looking for a book by Jack Gilbert, he's offered one or two by Jane Hirschfield; if looking for Inger Christenson he instead must stare into the face of the collected poems of Billy Collins, and so forth.

Walking, however, feels good, as does being alive. The complex carbohydrates fiddle around with him at first, then arrange themselves properly as if belonging to a god.

If the 'future is guided by benevolent algorithms' as the Google founders declare, then so is the past and the present.

The word of the day is pleonasm, a noun, the definition of which is the use of more words than are necessary to express an idea.