love song for girl in chat room #2
by Cabell

The heart electric pulses in the void: black-hot
as any circuitry or synapse, but not so clean
or sanitary. The heart, transliterated binary, may rot
as any corpse submerged in swamp serene--

What better picture of data flows that careen
to stand-still small talk and your shuttered eyes,
become whirlpools from which you reach obscene,
a siren, glittering in fractals, whose languid cries

repeat a careful pattern: birdsong digitized.
The heart may love a program. The heart may be
itself only a protocol, pathology and lies
repeated, no more the self than Hume could see.

But though perhaps we embrace by cold equation,
in the archive, are not hearts endless in every incarnation?

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