[A letter to my daughter]
 

Dear daughter, what good are bones if they can only house our marrow for a short time? 
Dear daughter, please hear me out—this is not the beginning of another dad-joke. 
Dear daughter, we’ve uploaded so many drawings, scribblings, pics and videos—let’s save them 
from more than the moldering basement!
Dear daughter, human beings could maybe store ourselves in skyless clouds, so much lighter 
than cemeteries. 
What good is data if we only leave it in our phones for burn-piles, for floods, for the fires 
that will return our cities to earth, water, sky?!
Where will we be once superconductors become brain-like and ancestor-like survivors wish 
to access videos, pics and text 
of their dead sapien lineage from familial clouds? 
Dear daughter, let them hear your father describe the beauty I hear in your voice when you 
laugh at our bow-tied dachshund Ted,
or complain about the texture of mush-a-rooms or then-and-then summarize an episode 
of Fuller House.  
When our devices sync with the cloud, we’re burying ourselves alive!  
So let’s leave them, as they say, exquisite corpses! Let’s leave them, sans corpus, dressed 
in photoshopped jetpacks, in a digital Cornell Box. 
So let’s rise from the egg of cellular death  
into the digital sanctum hidden here within the cloud.