Excerpt from an alternative memoir

    I can still see a little bit, one word at a time, 48-point type on the computer screen and of course I can touch-type, and if my fingers are positioned properly I can blaze across the screen like "the milltails of hell" as my grandfather used to say.  A logging term.  Arthur participated in the stripping of the world.  The ends of the boards, the "milltails" flying as logs are processed at breakneck speed into lumber.  Whoosh, I type fast.  I used to do physical labor, like the rest of the menfolk in my family, construction workers, timber men, mechanics and truck drivers all of them.  Then I did intellectual labor, staring into the digital sun.  Now I'm going blind.

But I can still write.  Unless my fingers are improperly positioned on the keyboard.  Then I get: S ejp;r nimvj pg honnrtodj yjsy hprd pm smf pm smf ejp vsm frvo[rt oyz  A cryptographer could decipher it, a cryptogram where all the e's are r's, etc.  Nobody wants to work that hard for somebody else's writing, though, not even my editor, though she does go the extra mile.  The extra kilometer.  She is German.  I can see well enough to send it to her and she will edit it after a fashion and publish it on one of the many self-publishing platforms that cater to the failed writers of the world and give us all hope.  A place for our maunderings and our trunk stories, our ersatz memoirs and our sexual fantasies.  Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Smashwords and Kobo.  Others, too inconsequential to mention.  We are all writers now.  It's the easiest art form.  With music you have to practice for a while and it's immediately obvious if you're not yet competent.  Painting costs money, lots of money for tubes and brushes, and it takes space and solvents to clean the brushes, and, like music, it's pretty obvious if you're terrible.  But every person who is literate is a writer.  Everybody who has commented on a Yahoo news story feels they have been published.  Everybody who's gotten a thumbs up on a Facebook posting feels like Beckett.  Everybody can publish, and does.  Everbybody transmitting all the time.

synthesis

the boat in the water carrying
half of eritrea to safety
is not the stuff of myth
or poetry but divine,
still, retribution
& poetic justice. half
the world has bludgeoned
half the world & now
the battered half
is coming
like a chromosome
seeking
completion.