exhibit a

in the ether…

This poem is a surveillance device. It is checking your emails, intercepting your calls, reading your thoughts before you have them. When the secret you’d not tell to a soul bobbed past us like a Coke can in the river, we hoiked it out and stowed it in our files. All citizens need protecting from themselves. We’ve made copies of your intimate photos. We know the websites you go to for your kicks. Remember those works you wrote when in your cups? That you thought you’d erased? We found them in the ether, awaiting transfer to a dropbox: the empty bird feeders sway in the wind. There’s light through the mesh where the nuts were stored and the seeds for the goldfinch have all flown.

blake morrison, prism

unheard…

Antisthenes says that in a certain faraway land the cold is so intense that words freeze as soon as they are uttered, and after some time they thaw and become audible, so that words spoken in the winter go unheard until the next summer.

plutarch, moralia

really…

The 25th of April is DNA Day. I know, you probably had no idea.

anne wojcicki

out in the cold

quest…

A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.

alan watts