Digital Literacy Centre
Skunk Tales
2022
We speak by sound.
vacillating between a collective consensus
filled with old disks and CDs,
archived pieces of pasts in his storage carefully catalogued,
in the soft, moist soil are plants that have lived long lives and are as healthy
he speaks, only when he has to, in a garbled way
The skunk nudged a pile of shimmering circuitry and surface,
we are imaging the future. There is a low hum of dread and the concern
We don't worry about making sense, we make
and individuating trajectories of fancy:
where screens with slow logos move
from one side to the other
while people talk and talk.
The screens,
ancient as the room itself, are dusty and pixelated
so that their waves are easily streamed and simulated
Each of us unique in our sounds.
For example the last person to arrive, to get their sound on,
by pulling them out of the storage
using a neat search engine
that does not now require the help of language but will.
pushed at it with its nose and saw that it was wet-seeming in the afternoon light.
pressed a paw upon the coils and felt
within its own digital enclaves.