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but which would be outdated in a few years &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.