Cyber-naut
By Andrew Garison
They say that the average person
Visits 138 websites in a day.
I don’t think I’ve done anything 138 times.
But it might as well be true.
All my time spent offline
Has begun to feel less valuable.
Why shouldn’t it be?
Everything I could possibly need
Is right there on the screen
All the complexities of human life
Distilling to simple lines of code
Ones and zeros.
It’s easier this way,
Leaving it all to the machines
Those marvels of efficiency
Those perfect time-wasters.
Tearing through tab after tab
I hardly notice the
Beams of orange and pink
Prying through the panes.
But who really cares, anyway?
You see one sunset, you see them all.
Why subject myself
To the cold breeze
That chaps my lips
Or the slushy grey snow
That makes my stomach sick
When there’s a better, brighter
Virtual reality at my fingertips?
I can do most anything from my chair:
At 10, I took a stroll down a Venetian Canal
At 11, I learned the word verisimilitude
At 12, as single swipe introduced me
To my soulmate for the next 48 hours
At 1, Buzzfeed taught me the
Top 10 Tricks to Stop Procrastinating
And Get Shit Done!
I bookmarked it for later.
But tired eyes, dry from blue light
And hours of unadulterated staring
Signal the end of yet another techno-circus.
The need for sleep
That failure of biology
Takes over, same as every night.
Monitors darken, eyelids shut
And that old program–Dreams.exe–boots up.
A virtual reality of nature’s own design, oh,
Oh, so dull.