equal signs

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guest post by Reynaldo Ishiwasho 

just feet from me sit three women

talking in a coffee house

about this and that and other things

I pay little attention to

 

they are mere feet from me

 

on the table next to this spiral notebook

sits my phone

a powerful computer more capable

in itself of the super power

sent on some early apollo missions

 

with it I can push buttons

communicate instantaneously across

the globe

with some compatriot who I know

only by those buttons

and a pixilated image on a social media page

 

should I celebrate this strangely

small world

or should I mourn for not knowing

these three women whose real voices

and concerns I pay no attention to

and instead think only of these pixilated

images of unmet compatriots

 

I am confused

 

I know I communicate across

the world on the basis of

mathematics

a two-0digit system where

everything is translated into

a zero and one and then

back again

 

back and forth back and forth

 

mathematics masking and unmasking

my possible words to a being

I never physically met

whose vocal cords never shimmered

for me so that my ear could

hear his voice

 

but these women I don't know

their vocal cords shimmer

and my ears hear but

I don't focus on their talk

don't listen

 

because the world has

become too small

has been reduced in some ways

to mere zeroes and ones

and their related pixels that sometimes

move and sometimes don't

 

what is it to hear another

in such a world

what is it to talk and listen

 

no math

can account for the vocal cords'

nuances

to the way a slight tonal shift can alter 

an entire world—

a world formed by a conversation

 

math is not equal to us

or to this teeming world

of trees and bugs and glorious weeds

 

yet we have allowed us to be

equal to it

too often

too often I fear

 

____________________________

 

Reynaldo Ishiwasho was born of an acorn beneath the wide canopy of a shade oak. While he is definitely human, as his name implies, he has no known ethnicity or race. He's just kind of a rootless tree man. He is just beginning to publish poetry.

 

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