working title

flash forward
to the first day
of an english literature class
in our
tenuous
future

a professor
discusses the syllabus
and delivers the
history of word creation
in fifty minutes,
less,
if he’s out of coffee

(*if your internal monologue
is balking
at my making the professor
in this poem male
stop reading now
this isn’t for you)

of the
bards
poets
writers
painters
artists all
defining this digital age
twill be said they
published into a fog
of ones and zeros
to indiscriminate masses

they will discuss not what was written
but what was lost to the medium

known simply
as
the masturbationalists