Tom Fasano

So, yes, here is the tape rolled across my driveway. And, Yes, my yard needs some cleaning up after a few rare winter storms in my neck of the woods.

The poem unspooled from the Phomeme thermal printer like an EKG readout of a dying dream, line after heat-sensitive line, until the machine itself whispered the inevitable: a spectral blue strip, the color of an old lover’s veins. That was the ending, foretold by the medium itself — an apocalyptic omen baked into the banal mechanics of a cash register’s entrails.

And then my wife (Sandy) and I did what any two prophets of the mundane would do: we took that serpentine scripture, my holy writ of impulse and thermal imprints, and unfurled it in a madcap relay, watching it slither across the driveway like a tape measure of fleeting genius. It was a ticker-tape parade for two, a celebration of nothing and everything, as the wind attempted to edit my masterpiece, scattering syllables like the last words of the dying.

I used a plastic bucket to catch it as it emerged from my Phomeme thermal printer.