No more ink,
nothing wet.
Just fine black powder
sprayed on paper and bonded in a flash
of electrostatic forgery.
Letters, words, sentences appear
faster than meteors
fizzing and sputtering through the atmosphere.
Quills, lead, even rolling balls –
things of the past.
Poems and stories conjured today
by Maxwell’s demons and Schrödinger’s cats.
Imagine Hamlet emerging
on a Hewlett-Packard laser jet.
Never mind a million monkeys
typing for a million years.
Now it’s countless motes of black dust
shooting through space,
falling willy-nilly on the white surface,
cast into shapes and forms
that say, “To be or not to be.”
Well is it?
Is dust destined to speak,
to replace ink and even thought?
– Roger S Jones
