But What It Is It Never Knows

You think of information
As countably inside us,
All our lines of texts and code.
You know it’s mostly context?

Do be do be do might seem
Utterly inferior
To to be or or not to be,
But without the entire speech,

Without the whole play, era,
Everything Shakespeare’s become
In the centuries since then?
What to do with do be, then?

Three dots, three dashes, three dots
From a ship caught in the ice
In the age of radio
Meant more than everything left

Of oral cosmologies,
The texts of the Minoans,
The seals of the Harappans.
Material data,

Information’s never more
Than residue, while meaning,
Well, even meanings ourselves
Aren’t sure what we are made of.