Clickety-clack and a tappy-tap.
Fingers hailing down upon the keys.
Lights and sounds which hurt my eyes,
Eventually turning me into a blind sot,
Steal me away into the ether!
Among the floating orbs of wisdom
Resting silently beneath the homepage.
What mysteries must wait in yonder fields,
Elysian in their coding and their filament growing?
As the narrow wall of videos holds infinite realities,
I am born in the shadow of Google and Amazon.
One click and I’ve got everything I could ever need.
Happenstance has peppered me among these neophytes,
Dear postulants of the technological age.
Though I am no stranger to the buzzing lights and search engines,
A stranger in a strange land I remain to find myself,
Lost and stolen by these fluctuations of matter and mind.
The digital world, what a confounding enigma.
Drawing upon flat surfaces borne of paper’s obsolescence.
Incessant pinging of newsreels hot off the keyboard,
Knowing about my mother’s cousin’s best friend’s children
And how they can roll around across the floor.
Just little matrices of information trickling down my screen.
I’ve been lost before, but nothing like this.
I rode my bike once on the Bronx River Parkway
And when I looked away, I couldn’t find my family.
But they were there up ahead, and my cries were heard.
If I cry in this space, none will hear.
And should they – is it even authentic?
Will I cry to let my cascading emotions out?
Or is it nothing more than a self-indulgent,
Performative, sensational act put on to get more views?
I want more views…
I need them if I want to stay here.
And even if I don’t want to stay, there’s nowhere else to go.
I can never go back.
I see my friends on the screen and I make my meetings,
Replacing my comfy couch with the church basement aluminum seating.
There are nice things in the nicer corners
Where I usually spend my time.
Depending on the day though, I might dig deeper down inside.
There is dirt down there – have you ever seen it?
Fossils of long-dead websites crumbling to sediment.
You know the ones – with all the JPEGs and GIFs –
I say GIFs with a hard G, by the way.
They used to be formatted without a care,
As people input some codes in HTML,
Without using CSS or Java for margins and padding
Or to make any of it look clean and modern.
I don’t go any deeper than that.
For down there are the monstrous Old Ones –
The darkness from whence our halcyon Olympus hath emerged.
On the backs of coders and engineers we have made our homes,
Turning the basicity of the old world into the convoluted new.
And each day I take in more information,
But I find that I know so much less.
Despite being able to spout out the latest memes
And can pull up a peer-reviewed papers in a nanosecond,
My brain is not my own anymore.
It’s yours to dissect and analyze –
To prod and stimulate with whatever you create.
I’m your creation and I’m also your creator.
So, please don’t leave me.
Never let me go.
So, I can stay in this garden of wonder and glory,
And not fall into the abyss to settle amongst the forgotten.
