Measured in Folders

What drips could be wine, or blood,
    or the crystal water of a mountain spring.
What sieves through our fingers could be time, dreams,
    or the dark soil of our garden.
The ink leaking from fingertips
    prints out letters, digits, filenames,
    but never people and never lives.

The ink decides people's lives
    by means of hasty indifferent fingers.
    It smears over faces, leaving out blank gazes,
    immortalised on paper or light.
The empty plastic bottle resides 
    by the mountain spring,
    and in the garden
    carefully measured roses out of wholesale keep growing.
Printed lines steal away our lives in hours and years here,
    and smeared ink underneath blows up houses elsewhere.
    Corpses decay into numbers
    as our days and months fill the waste paper basket.