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System Failure
Manna Valiathan, M.D.
manna.valiathan@gmail.com
A computer crashes,
They never know why.
Hardware, software,
Viruses, nothing to go by.
Theories and suppositions,
No real explanations.
Its crashed.
A simple fact.
A crash,
That's all.
All data lost,
Hours of work
Erased, vanished
Without a trace.
Can't be retrieved they say.
Should have backed it up anyway.
Shrug and turn away.
It's just a crash.
And now I crash.
I don't quite know why.
Theories and suppositions,
Facts and explanations,
They whirl around
In manic frenzy
My head spins, dizzy.
The fact is simple
Nothing new,
I've crashed.
Lost in a flash
All the progress I made,
All the strength I gained,
All the peace attained,
All gone, without a trace.
There are no backups
For a fragment of life
That is lost,
For all that disappears
In a crash.
I struggle to remember,
Put pieces back together.
It hurts,
The memory of how far I came
And now
All drives reformatted, empty,
Waiting to be written on again.
And so I start,
Pick up the pieces,
Put them together,
Undoing a crash,
Knowing forever
There could always be
Another empty me,
Just crashed.
About the Author
Manna Valiathan is a pathologist working in a medical school in south India.
Published: March 26, 2008
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