Secrets From The Future

Get your most closely kept personal thought:
put it in the Word .doc with a password lock.
Stock it deep in the .rar with extraction precluded
by the ludicrous length and the strength of a reputedly
dictionary-attack-proof string of characters
(this, imperative to thwart all the disparagers
of privacy: the NSA and Homeland S).
You better PGP the .rar because so far they ain’t impressed.
You better take the .pgp and print the hex of it out,
scan that into a TIFF. Then, if you seek redoubt
for your data, scramble up the order of the pixels
with a one-time pad that describes the fun time had by the thick-soled-
boot-wearing stomper who danced to produce random
claptrap, all the intervals in between which, set in tandem
with the stomps themselves, begat a seed of math unguessable.
Ain’t no complaint about this cipher that’s redressable!
Best of all, your secret: nothing extant could extract it.
By 2025 a children’s Speak & Spell could crack it.

You can’t hide secrets from the future with math.
You can try, but I bet that in the future they laugh
at the half-assed schemes and algorithms amassed
to enforce cryptographs in the past.

And future people do not give a damn about your shopping,
your Visa number SSL’d to Cherry-Popping
Hot Grampa Action websites that you visit,
nor password-protected partitions, no matter how illicit.
And this, it would seem, is your saving grace:
the amazing haste of people to forget your name, your face,
your litanous* list of indefensible indiscretions.
In fact, the only way that you could pray to make impression
on the era ahead is if, instead of being notable,
you make the data describing you undecodable
for script kiddies sifting in that relic called the internet
(seeking latches on treasure chests that they could wreck in seconds but didn’t yet
get a chance to cue up for disassembly)
to discover and crack the cover like a crème brûlée.
They’ll glance you over, I guess, and then for a bare moment
you’ll persist to exist; almost seems like you’re there, don’t it?
But you’re not. You’re here. Your name will fade as Front’s will,
‘less in the future they don’t know our cryptovariables still.

Now it’s an Enigma machine, a code yelled out at top volume
through a tin can with a thin string, and that ain’t all you
do to broadcast cleartext of your intentions.
Send an email to the government pledging your abstention
from vote fraud this time (next time: can’t promise).
See you don’t get a visit from the department of piranhas.
Be honest; you ain’t hacking those. It’d be too easy,
setting up the next president, pretending that you were through freezing
when you’re nothing but warming up: ‘to do’ list in your diary
(better keep for a long time — and the long time better be tiring
to the distribution of electrical brains
that are guessing every unsalted hash that ever came).
They got alien technology to make the rainbow tables with,
then in an afternoon of glancing at ‘em, secrets don’t resist
the loving coax of the mathematical calculation,
heart of your mystery sent free-fall into palpitations.
Computron will rise up in the dawn, a free agent.
Nobody knows the future now; gonna find out — be patient.

*litanous: adj., comprising a litany or litanies