My morning/ evening draws its curtains down – I’m sitting here alone.I pick up books. I put them down. I turn on the TV.
But it holds no joy, I turn it off. The stillness wraps ‘round me.
A restless longing fills me – as I shrug off descending gloom,
Then the flick of a simple switch invites the world into my room.
News, amusement, music, colours, movement, sound.
If anything exists out there, then this is where it’s found.
Joined by synthetic framework, beyond a changing screen,
A million fingers on a billion keys, yet faces go unseen.
Infinite silent voices chatting endless written streams,
Flowing fonts of black and white – hidden agendas, hidden dreams.
Mother boards, and silicon chips, software, megabytes,
A myriad of wires, connections conveying human rights.
Where parenthesis is smiling, but laughter goes unheard,
And tears are shed invisibly, fear and pain, with not a word.
And the legions of the lonely, the single and the bored,
Come worship at the altar where Microsoft is lord.
In the jungle, silent screaming, logging in and logging off,
I search for something real, something human, something lost,
And amidst the endless babble of humanity passing through,
In a break in the anonymous – a shift- and there is you.
A friendly voice in printed guise, a caring string of words.
The spelling is quite different but the message undeterred.
And pulsing through the cyber space I feel, not see, your smile,
Your energy reaches from beyond a screen to touch me for a while.
So strange that in this high tech world, where machines rule endlessly,
Across dark miles, a human heart can light a flame for me.
