Less Than Three
She wakes; and all the world’s a mess
Of raw and jumbled, mixed-up text;
In green-on-green, each snapshot seems
Like hard-drive failure’s broken screen;
So here’s a chair of @s and &s,
Some colon-cluster cats and cans,
The apple tree a sad array
Of senseless, vowel-repelling j.
She yawns; then patiently she picks
A broken clock apart to fix,
Like grains of sand or coloured beads,
With fingernails she lifts, and seeds,
And coaxes beauty out of these
Preposterous apostrophes.