Software

The kettle pipes a clean, machine-made dawn,
our wrists bright with sleep-data and weather.
A child asks the house for stories; it answers
in grandmother’s laugh, clipped from an archive.
On the tram, faces tilt to the glass—
ghosted maps, heat-bloomed fingerprints,
a tide of small blue notifications.

We practise our vowels on a drone’s low hover,
teach it to recognise “come home” and “enough.”
In the market, a florist 3D-prints a rose
the exact red of a favourite jersey lost in ’09.
Someone buys two, taps to split the cost;
the receipt arrives like light on a lake,
shivering the name we used to sign.

At clinic, the nurse adjusts my borrowed heart.
Her hands are sure; the algorithm hums
a lullaby of stuttered code and breath.
I remember your coat—graphite, rain-salted—
how your pockets were full of receipts you meant to file,
and the way we said we like a soft command,
executed in the background, always true.

Then the turn: I call you by your old username
and the room populates—photos, receipts, pulse logs—
love cached in formats no one standard owns.
The drone returns without being asked,
draws a circle on the floor with its shadow.
I step into it, my heart ticks once, twice;
the house brightens a fraction, as if it knows.

Outside, the tram writes its silver line again.
A wind lifts carbon dust from the verge;
it smells like rain on solder, like first days.
I press my palm to the door, and it learns me—
not perfectly, but enough to yield.
Somewhere a server farms our night for meaning;
somewhere your laugh, compressed, keeps keeping time.