Marie Antoinette

Through her walls, she feels the beat
Of a riot song going on outside
As she sits on the bed, bent over
Her own computer

Whose screen flashes commands in black and blue

She has been told that computers
Make color with light
And no pigments,
But what could this machine know of colors?
For a second she dares to be distracted,
Faces the flood of real colors around her
—Oranges and golds and dark, sick mauves
All blending blindingly into one another—

Now the beat outside her walls
Gets louder, faster,

And it is only a song,
But she thinks she hears the shouts of the revolutionaries
And pistol shots and cannons
Breaking against her bedroom door.

She steels her ears against them
So that she hears only a hint of a tune,
Her fingers staggering out words
To the chaotic beat of the clock
On the computer screen,

Whose colors are slowly beginning to look real

But when she hears the last clatter of hi-hat cymbals
One against the other, like a sigh,
Her eyes flutter open for a split instant!

Her heart quickens in the silence,
For now—and she knows this because she has read it in books
About human history—
Now is the moment
When those radicals storm the fortress!

She glances at the pounding computer clock,
Sees that time is running short,
Anxiously wonders
How many words can she fit in
Before the massacre begins?