OCD-MINDED

OCD-minded that I am,
I spent the morning re-formatting
blog pages from April of 2009,
because someone had asked me
who was the most famous person I'd ever met.
I couldn't choose just one, I chose many,
so I looked up an old blogpost of mine,
and noted that it needed a little tweaking.
I fixed a typo here, an extra space there,
an unfinished thought with the verbs gone missing.
It was a good a place as any to begin, scrubbing text,
and whipping those old pages into shape,
but one bad post invariably led to another.
What was Google thinking,
changing formatting mid-stream like that?
It makes me look like an idiot
in retrospect. How many more pages?
Wrestling with bad HTML code
is like grappling faulty memory banks
with gaff hooks, reliving the past
viewed in errant type and odd spacing
is a stubborn clown's holiday.
The broken code just won't let go
of that sudden blossom of words
in extra large type, or in a different font,
midstream. You have to strip it clean
of all commands, and begin again.
Or you can't see the bleedin' forest,
or even the trees, for that matter,
on the cyber page. This mayhem
a frog's breakfast of electronic ink
gone awry.

4/20/18