The Day I Became a Computer

To whom it may concern,
I leave my human life to you.
After spending so much time
typing away at poems,
courting my screensaver,
surfing great swells of web,
I've finally become a computer.

As I was writing one morning,
I teetered on the edge of my Mac,
the twinkle of creative failure
looming always like acid soup,

so I put on a mining helmet,
said "screw it," and went in
to that whirring plane
of mechanical gray matter,
that I recognized as my own.

I was halved and the outside air
touching my cyber tissue felt swell,
like the soft pads of a cat
crawling on my electronic kidneys.

I stood, awake in electric sight, performing
a yellow-eyed survey of the day's odd revelations
that brought me still closer to Steve Jobs.

For this I blame all those years
of waking each morning to longing,
mooning over the hum and glow
of my screen life, that space of literary want,
scrambling over hypertext, tracing link patterns
in pixilated outer space,

changing my background image
when in need of a paradigm shift,
emailing with other writers I've never met
yet care about, my inexplicable digital loves,

trying to rip open the aperture of words,
to commit an act of violence against apathy,
that leaves my readers suddenly alive,
so strangely and beautifully filled.