Data Hunger

Dark expanses split the crowded planes.
There’s yet another war going on
It’s hard to witness inside of you.

Testify. Information is not
Quite the same thing as life, and hunger
Does not care for data in the least.

There’s a kind of contest difficult
To observe with the usual tools,
Since all the signs themselves are involved.

The best you can do involves likeness,
Metaphor, analogy—you know
How lichens involve combinations

Between at least two kingdoms of life?
That itself is already just likeness,
But consider hunger and data

As more fundamental than kingdoms
While equally entangled in lives.
Now consider ideas, jumping genes,

BovB, libraries, conspiracies,
Retroviral germline infections—
Genes, viruses, notions—quasi lives,

Close to entirely information,
Lacking their own metabolism,
Lacking any real hunger, and yet

They spread, hitching rides on hungry lives.
And then consider hungry lives, cells,
Pumps, local entropy reversals.

These are even more mysterious.
They depend on hereditary
Information but no specific

Set or means of getting it. Hunger
Generates data that surfs on it,
As if lichen’s fungal component

Generated the algae that broke
Off to end up in other lichens.
You see? To explain any of this

In language is to take data’s side,
Viral facts, crowded planes of ideas
The dark expanses mutely divide.