Home to Uncanny Valley

(It's loose and noisy and discordant - pretty much half-baked, but at this point, after a great many, but still too few, edits, I have to put it somewhere besides back in my head. I've no doubt as soon as I click publish, I'll see the next dozen things that are wrong with it, and can get back to work.)

The traveler rolls in on little mouse wheels ~

            coming back to the old homenothome stead.

Google Earth & thirty years time

turn a virtual reunion

            with streets of home,

            into an encounter with Uncanny Valley,

            strangely familiar & familiarly strange.

Edging down streets by mouse click

            scrolling through hours and years

                        this block updated last week

                                    that block last year

                                                next block year before

                        all newer by decades

                        than your own ~ than my own ~

last lead-boxed memories

                                    with only boozy watermarks to make clear

                                                which “when” that that “where” was.

Remembrance and reality

            past and present

                        scanning for the monsters and mundanities

                                    I knew still lurked

                                    in alleys

                                    basements

                                    back rooms

                                    parks and parlors.

My own stereoscope of truths

            which eye, left or right, owns which chimera?

            Sun-faded Kodachrome or bright pixels,

            my mind’s eye or Google’s virtual vistas,

            which will fade and which dominate

                        absorb the meaning

and claim the truth for its own?

Laminates of time laid in pixel boxes

                        overlays of memories

                        themselves back-dropped by distances

                                    of miles and years

                        shadows of ghosts drape the pavement

                                    flow down the sidewalk.

                        I look for familiar life,

 to see friends as they were

                                    and as they are

                        But none look familiar:

                                    their skeletons all on the inside.

My own ghost, his shadow seared into walls and walks

            laminated to the landscape

                        with haints of those haunts

                                    conversing through grim rictus

                                    “My how he’s grown” &

           “My how he’s the same.”

                                    and wrong on both counts.

No one, real or virtual, goes home again,

            unless he never left,

            home and again imply

                        a once upon

                                    even for a story with more end than start.

Down what layered street were the fictions;

            in what alleys hid the facts

and when were they whichever they were?

When all is past, all caches cleared,

It’s just a strange old story

            told by some vague boy

            to another you.

            inside a different me.