Coming of Age in Cyberspace

I grew up in an unfurling wilderness

of interconnected machines

—the 90’s.

No one taught me to hunt deer

so I hunted for modems,

memorized the tones of

analog phones

instead of bird song.

Carrier signals

were like the calls of rare

and elusive

creatures

obscured by a vegetation of wire.

IP addresses

glowed on screens

like footprints

winding through terminals of text,

laying trails

that could be followed.

.No one taught me to dream with the earth

or be possessed by the spirits

of the animals,

so I was haunted

by the strange wildness

of networks.

A virtual ecology

with its own terrain

yet animated by that original pump,

the heart.

In a brilliant dystopian mythos

the disembodied soul

was the animal I hunted,

the one whose movements

I longed to understand.

.Eventually, after years

of tracing circuits

with my finger

like braille

—the promise of meaning

looming in the dark—

I found a path

leading back

(or maybe forward?)

into the eco-system

a green world

of soft borders

and furry logic.

.

Trailing a deer

in desert twilight

I become a spirit

chasing the horizon

like a dream.

Cloven tracks glow darkly

on the sand,

their magnetism

like the static fuzz

of those glass screens

that flooded the bedroom

of my youth

with foreign light.

The medium

has changed

but the dazzle

of mystery

is the same,

and the green-tinged window

to the Other-world

remains.

.

it was a network

of machines

that taught me

relationship is the

magical substance

of our world.