Ode to Code: A Geek Poem

Just think:
The twine of sine
and cosine, twang of tangents,
tangles of angles and twirls of tris,
the way each curve is wavelength,
like a sound is wavelength, light is
wavelength. A four forty’s tone
is blue, its hertz a wiggle,
wobble, flow from
high to low, a
nanometer’s
drunken walk
the shade of skies.
Perhaps by this was Schumann
driven mad; the way the math invades,
pervades, like A four forty in his ear
for years: a cosmic radio of audio
uncaused by any known thing.
Oh, the song was blue,
but blues were
something
Schumann
never heard.
Or always did.
Or thought he always did.
The azimuth, horizon, incidence;
The cadence, coda, recapitulation.
These are all the whirlwind tang of life:
From helices in mitochondria to lacy
fractal leaves to strings vibrating
quarks, and time we see
cross-sectioned.
Here we
have the arc
of it, the seconds. Mark.
And now, we twist our code
in loops, recurse in tighter spirals, flow
through chains of consequence — input
output GIGO FILO — at play with toys
that mimic magic, reify and
retro-fy, a Bezier here,
vector there,
a wave
of bosses, twirl
Of blues, a count of lives, all binary.
Signs, sines, sprites, twines, tangents, tunes, time. In rhyme.

-Ralph Koster