digital footprints

one night i dreamt i was surfing in cyberspace &

many images flickered in Adobe Flash

with every movement made, every keystroke &

slide of the mouse to & fro,

i hadn’t a clue (in real time), but i knew

that there were centillions of digital footsteps

being made with every moment

leaving their print upon the world within the screen

(still outside my own physical self)---

while my own history could partially be brought up

manually on my PC, i knew that

every phone call, every movie watched & every second

spent on the web,

had been recorded somewhere,

being held for an indeterminate amount of time &

unlike those nutjobs who say they had a

“near death experience” &

their lives flashed before their eyes,

i myself was fairly certain that

i would never come in complete contact with

this shadow of online presence.

 

this, however, did not bother me,

because whether my life was dragging down deep in

the gutter or

flying up in the air by the seat of its pants,

i was grounded in the cooling light of backlit LED pixels,

which would be with me until my dying day

(or until i became one with them in the future).

 

and there was no conversation with my PC,

because it was not a capable artificial intelligence

(as of yet) & therefore it had to abide my own human

error

(alas, PC, i pity thee) &

unlike the fictional “lord” of those religious idiots out there

walking in the sand,

it did not “speak to me” when i was down on my knees

squinting to myself with hands clasped

(um, for i wasn’t),

conversating inside my own head

hoping for answers to questions

to magically arise from my own fragmented,

severely delusional &

quite obviously

batshit

mad

psyche.

 

no, there was no made up excuse

for which this human had to look to

in order to alleviate responsibility for those things

that are the most absolutely horrible

which all of us humans have done to each other,

the world around us &

to ourselves,

but rather

only quality time spent

between myself & my computer,

which had evolved from a less impressive model to its

current state,

but which would be outdated in a few years &

get scrapped for a better one,

until its own superiority

surpassed my own &

i needed to become one with it---

then, there would be no

digital footprints at all,

for they’d all be

within.