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 cr?me br?l?e.

They'll glance you over, I guess, and then for a bare moment

you'll persist to exist