Once were

[Brownlie]

I awoke with different stripes
finger-painted on my hide,
the sort that only show when your eyes are closed.

Shouts and flashes built my box
and I am independent of the floor
I once commanded,

a transportable label that others know
by osmosis rather than effort, as they
absorb the quiddity you stapled to the bill.

Fragments of me leave
in iMemories. Collected and centrifuged,
they would yield nothing but sludge:

omitto tacitus

I have a rather pompous and longwinded response to your poem. The word “identity” creates an instant paradox that implies a being is singular and independent. David Hume applied time as the medium to unify identity in our imaginations. A recent candidate for the American Presidency, Mitt Romney, used the mythic figure of Steve Jobs as an American Paradigm in one of his speeches. Romney seemed to revere Job's as one would revere Henry Ford who we all know is credited with the idea of the assembly line. Romney’s running mate advertised the songs on his ipod to appeal to the youth. Imemories seems to imply a branding from capitalistic forces and an identity in an artificial world. The FBI categorizes “Cyber Space” as a new plane of warfare. If we look to history the narratives received are largely those of Caucasians. We also have to consider the fact that some of our oldest examples of poetry are translated and come from authors that we may have trouble pinpointing. I.E. “The Homeric entity.” Can we express universal truth in a word that exceeds the truth of a tautology? Centrifuged is a rough word suggesting artificial forces that move rapidly circular I can see how a sludge can be made from artificial forces that can exceed the strength of gravity. I don't know what the latin your using means in english...