[Newspoetry] Look on my works ye mighty and despair

[Donald L Emerick]

It's foolish to write for the ages
when none in present life reads you.

Millions upon millions even billions
have never once worried about PLATO:
they don't know whether he even lived,
where he might have lived, or even said,
who were his teachers, friends, students,
where he liked to walk, what he ate,
who he kissed and when and why.

Sometimes, I only remember the machine
the one that ran PLATO, the other PLATO,
the one at the UI.CERL some decades ago,
the one that defined the standard system,
notefiles of large distributed systems,
the specialized pedagogical machinery,
presenting lessons, examining students,
preparing them to respond to questions
a thousand other machines would ask them
again and again, until their lives end,
defying the logic of machine learning.

What hope is there for any of my words,
the ones that I lovingly sing and strum,
the ones of craft, stroke and sc(rot)um--
yes, shoot the rot out of the bag, in sum,
nobody will be sifting the dust finding me.