Eighty years young she makes her cakes
To the scratchy ambience of an old transistor radio.
A step up from the tube jobs,
Though steeped well into the twentieth century.
She listens to 60's tunes,
Stuff she'd never acknowledge back in the day
When you would hear her sing along with Doris Day
Or whistle to a tune by the Tommy Dorsey band
She's evolved, I guess…
Lumbering like an old dinosaur
Hollowed out from babies long since gone
Her psyche has crawled a couple of decades
While the world morphed past her
A confused jumble of crossed wires and mixed metaphors
How ironic that she latches on to this old transistor radio,
With a new computer in the other room
Like some primitive beast toying with the knob of television
As if it all came out of there somehow
Those ancient transistors ineffectually chiding us
To believe that they will try harder
Someday in the science fiction future
Someday…in the other room
She struggles to dial in her favorite station,
Which phases in and out with Latin pop
Forgetting her recipe measurements as the drifting frequencies
Heterodyne her thought processes
