busy"Heisenbugs"
In the febrile gap between
letters and numbers live
the Heisenbugs.
They bring the déjà vu
of things seen again and again,
a glitch in the matrix; and
the jamais vu of things
never seen before.
They perch on the tip of the tongue
and crunch numbers before
they can be summed,
words before they can be recognized.
They make the misconceptions
and the mistaken readings,
the lexical gaps and overlaps.
When is it fog, and
when is it a cloud?
Oh, wait, the word in the list
was humility, not humidity.
They live in computer programmers,
and thereby get into computers
and programs, far more fatal
than the wing of a moth.
The next thing you know,
December is January and
we're left wondering
how the glitch stole Christmas.
* * *
Notes:
Déjà vu is an eerie sense of repetition.
Jamais vu is an eerie sense of unfamiliarity.
Tip of the tongue is a sense of almost knowing something: the query activates the correct memory packet, but it fails to make the transit up to the conscious mind.
The first computer bug was an actual moth.
