The Archive

by Ed Sanders

Edward Sanders’ archive
was buried at the
Norton, Illinois landfill
in 437 bankers boxes
plus two portable safes
containing a computerized archives list
and a few thousand photographs

The tapes and digital storage devices:
LaCie hard drives, videotapes, 12 inch stereo reel-to-reels
4-, 8-, and 16-track tapes, computer drives, SD cards,
ADAT SVHS tapes, Hi-8 tapes, cassettes, et alia multa
were dumped into primordial dirt
a few feet above the water line

Ditto for his drawings & art works

Three centuries went by
and the half human/half ’borg species
now dominant on Earth
dug it up
and put a lot of it out on view
for Instant Scanning
by the so-called public

including an assortment of
scholars of the pre-’borg era.

His phone message tapes from 1978
became a popular ambient sound relaxation brain implant

and thus a kind of knowledge of another poet’s
time of life
was passed forward
for a few more centuries

tough times, you know,
because of the rebellion of the colonies
on Mars and Pluto