The conductor of a certain bandwidth waves you down
a passage of transits. Its gates stand open and resolute;
it commands the fate of all the passing phantoms
and, of course, you. You’re taken into a wide place
where tickets are sold, schedules eyed and traced
to cirrus patterns overhead. An algorithm emerges.
It gathers everything unto itself, so clearly holy
that you’d tether tongues to it, if you were here.
If you were here, you’d say something about ghosts
in machines, something particular to this very room,
this old table even, scrawled with all those possible futures.
Given your presence and vast precision, even these stains
of tobacco juice and pigeonshit might become a train,
a waystation, a flowchart for the everything still unsaid.

-Laura W. Allen