Forsaken Hymns
posted Sep 11, 2025 by Tom Fasano
posted Feb 28, 2025 by 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.