1.44 MB of Ghosts

I was the kid who hid candies in the shoebox

but the shoebox turned into a floppy

and the floppy forgot how to be square Mom yelled from the kitchen smelling like instant soup

“Turn off that damn computer!”

now the soup’s a corrupted .wav

and it tastes like magnetic rust (glitch chorus – repeat 3x, getting more chopped each time)

stored

in 1.44

mega—bytes of—

n o t h i n g l e f t

the park where I crashed my bike

plays backwards

laughter rises like tears

and the scrape on my knee bleeds red pixels my first Game Boy

green screen half-dead

but I still hit start

and a whale song whispers

“game over… game over… game over…” (whales swell, distorted into high-frequency digital cries)[Bridge – Unreadable Sector – sound poetry]

(low male voice, chopped/reversed, over constant disk clicks + pulsing AM static) click-clack 3.5

sector 042 bad sector bad

childhood.exe not found

404 youth not found pixel of play-doh

melted into binary

0101 smell of rain

on a backyard that doesn’t exist bad sector bad sector

retry / cancel / format

Mom says “turn it off”

but the button’s a deleted memory (whale loop stretched into a long “nooooo”, glitched and fragmented)

(multiple male voices overlapping, building chaos)

remember the smell of warm Play-Doh?

or was it the burning monitor?

the dog we had is named “Untitled-1.bmp”

and he barks in binary: 01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 Dad formatted the hard drive

without asking

now I search for my birthday

in the recycle bin of the sky

(full collapse: whales screaming in accelerated loops, AM static maxed with overlapping reversed ads – “attention!” “don’t touch!” “limited time!” backwards – multiple voices shouting at once) insert coin to continue childhood

insert coin…

insert… (chaotic overlap, all at once:)

turn off the computer!

bad sector! bad sector!

1.44 MB of ghosts!

game over!

formatted forever!