Sci-fi poem!

At eighteen she is ready to tackle the Instrument. Spreads fluidly as when water leaks through cobblestone cracks, plug lines evaporate invisibly as an electric impulse through the air rips into the fabric of time and inscribes a healing magic after it. The oroburos encircles the fibrous, brittle bones of her wrist. An air jet rumbles in her chest. In the room it’s black almost, gray walls, deeply purple lacquered furniture, the hint of a picture frame unlit, too many switches in their “off” position. The jet rumble has escaped her. Face hot with the expectation of the completely unexpectable, something buds up out of her, perhaps a valuable liquid, perhaps some falsely wired circuitry, perhaps the memory of a year playing jax and rock-paper-scissors with other children in the school yard, paper and scissors and other children and schoolyard mixed up in the fabric, too distant to see clearly, too foreign to really feel it again, a quiet rumpling like a mosquito in her ear, a paper-cut snake bite now ghosting her fingertip, that tiny bubble of blood like the steady light of error. And though she was good at jacks and always won at rock-paper-scissors, on that fast emptying playground with its generator hum she couldn’t find the way to her name. Created a rift in that time space, the unborn twin of the mind. It is this that captures her always, a sudden shift in breath, the slight shudder her eye makes as it lists away from the screen, forgetting and remembering the same, her sight catching something not in the screen but on it, or backwards from it, the glow of an earlobe or the mirrored reflection of fingers, almost wires, punching keys. Shapes in her mind the first edges of reality, its encumbered layers not visible but just…

her mind can touch it sometimes. The Instrument blinks blue, yellow, blue against the farthest wall. Something in her fissures. There is nothing trailing behind to fill it up and like a sphinx, slowly rising from the dust gold sand, rippling off its fur the haze of time, the overlayment of memory and myth and meaning, it simply is now. Instrument makes a sound like an old crone’s cackle. Maybe her bones crack. Maybe the rift in time opens up and she slips into it, bare-footed and calm-eyed, the world re-stitching itself up after.