Data

To Kenneth Schmitz
v. dō, dāre, dedī, datum, “to give”

Round reality, yielding itself columnar:
what sold, what did not, what will never sell. 

Or tarrying on the gelatinous glaze of a petri dish, 
biohazards bloom in blotches we labor to label 

and measure—microlitered, megapixeled— 
this world of endless kindergarten gummy bears, 

clustered by color, and sorted by principle parts into 
our game renaming the givenness of life.