The New Self

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Our wall chart of human history
with time’s flat flow
places the first person

on the moon two inches east
of World War I, which lies
in its foxhole beside World War II.

We, the late baby boomers,
are specimens
of a transitional species

between homo sapiens
(knowing man, or
the pre-internet brain)

and the New Self (maybe homo
twitterus) selected for smaller
brains and thumbs.

Post-American schoolteachers
will ask who was the third
African-American president?

and students will find the answer
via their Ivy League Model trivia
microchip implanted at birth.

They will be born with the collective
unconscious engrafted in utero
renewable ad vitam, for life.

The New Selves will observe
our preserved pre-computer brains
the way we measure Cro-magnon skulls

and find us as alien
as we find our ancestral
pre-verbal hominids.

A future Noam Chomsky will
study the new language and find its roots
hardwired in our left hemispheres.

As for me and my slower brain,
I will abstain

and carve with my slow thumbs
Lucia was here
in a granite poem tombstone.