Prognosis.

Steffler, John

Prognosis

   If you leave, will you find a job you like any better?
   Is this lump cancer?
   Should I keep pouting money into this piece of junk?
   Is his smile fake?

   Telescope stethoscope horoscope computer model projection
   friend in a watchtower--are they coming this way? Yes.
   No.
   Maybe.

   When the way home was blocked by people wanting to kill him,
   Xenophon would choose his next step by opening a laptop
   goat--or sheep, pig, mule, ox--anything with long intestines
   and lots of colourful giblets was internet-ready. He would say,

   "Here, this is for you," add a god's name and kill the animal,
   sending the small wave of its freed energy to bolster the god's
   great store, and the god would look his way with approval,
   at least briefly, and that flash of attention would download a few

   bites of divine knowledge into the victim's guts.
   All he had to do then was pay an expert to decode the message.
   Xenophon had watched over the shoulders of so many geeks
   checking his mail from Zeus, he learned to do it himself,

   and that got him out of the wilds of Armenia, and he lived
   to write the account of his brutal escape which made me drunk
   with excitement. Good to think I'll read it again on some distant
   day--me or another me.