You look up from the ledger and see
Numerals dance before your eyes
And as you recline upon retiring
You see numerical figures
Projected upon the backs of your intermittent eyelids
Like a slideshow in the 1950s

The drudgery of keeping current
Of accounting for the incoming facts
A sorcerer’s apprentice
Drowning in the incoming flow
Acknowledging the agency not of oneself
But of that which trends

Fear of abstraction
Fear of machines
Nostalgia for the lost hope
Defense of the fading memories
Grief for the purged enthusiasm
Grief for the past elasticity

Now you have succeeded
And all the deadbolts lock at once
And variegated seeming declines to mere being
Parse the latest directive
Never ambiguity
Only superfluity

Can a database sustain tragedy
Can market research accommodate
An erectile engorgement of wishful thinking
Hemmed in rational affirmation
Repudiate the idealized past
And the dread future lose in mere forgetting