At the end of the last century
In a room overstuffed with documents
Forms too complicated for OCR
Optical character recognition
Strange phase from analog to digital
That change, like a fish first walking on land
Still needing to paper her gills to breathe
A sea of 9s to a hill of 0s
Some files grow massive, taking up whole shelves
A disease eats away at someone, slowly
Making mountains of paper, ‘til one day —
The last piece comes and we know that they’ve died
Our hearts weep for this person we have —
Only known through this long trail of paper