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The Story of My Life
...a poem
By MICHAEL SHARKEY
Turning from the phone I saw the last files
on the desktop disappear, and then the blank
face of the screen: my life swept clean:
Frank Zappa’s lyric came to mind, a true Zen
saying, ‘nothing’s what I want’: the years
all come to this: first, disbelief,
and then satori that exploded like a gun,
the I.T. people, shaking heads and talking
‘Nada, null, nichevo, nix, niente, rien, zilch’,
and taking monitor and works, to where
computers go to die. ‘So there’s no shadow
of a chance the backup worked?’ ‘No show’,
they said, ‘Some virus ate it.’ I recalled
the reassurance of the Book of Common
Prayer: ‘There is no health in us.’ My virtual
self now sharing my corruption, I wrote
postcards, watching spring erupt outside.
Caterpillars turned out in their droves,
and children stopped them from becoming butterflies:
the paths were littered with the dead.
Racing pigeons had far other business on their minds
than coming home. The I.T. people reappeared
and spoke of life beyond the grave: ‘We found
your files.’ And not a name among four hundred
thousand, all with matching dates: today’s.
I thought of how the CIA, the Federal Police
and ASIO, and all who pry for DIY instructions
on bomb-making, child pornography,
and Holocaust denial must make whoopee
when they hack for greater things than
lecture notes, attendance rolls, and all
the fodder that makes teaching what it is:
dull work for spooks. Cortez of the keyboard,
I began to open files and soon discovered
things long hidden or unknown: I had forgotten
those reports on dissertations of my students
in Hong Kong, a random letter (‘Hey, professor,
you don’t want to see the temples, let’s get lost
and have some fun’: the tight-packed cafes
after dark, the sudden journeys to the border,
and brisk traffic in commodities kept best
in memory’s safe), and then the deluge, high
and low. I recollected voyeurs’ lists
of what the garbage of celebrities contains,
generic signs of mundane life behind the glitz
and bling and glare. No glam in mine, but secret
history all the same, a lateral universe
of things preserved or trashed: the drafts of talks,
reviews and essays, poems kept from view
or published; wordless sound-bytes from the world
of students’ queries, office memos; lawyers’ news
that I am now an orphan’s heir (Remit your details
of account and password please); of lucky refunds
and rewards and hoards of cash retained by widows
in failed states, along with blow jobs, bigger
penis, and orgasms she will love, among
the graphics that the programmers included
for imagined other needs; I thought of Andy
Warhol’s credo: money’s MOOD, and sex expression
of nostalgia for a time when one had wanted it.
A world of chagrin huddled in that Babylon,
my iMac, where the Russian doxies offered
sex, and photos of my family looked abashed;
the random files clicked open, shut; I thought
of Beckett’s joker, ‘Why this farce day after
day?’, and dragged that world into the trash.
[First published in the Australian Literary Review, February 2010.]
The New England Writers' Centre is assisted by the NSW Government through Arts NSW.