Swish & Soup

Swish & Soup

At home:

On the corner of Noriega &

The Great Highway, the younger brother plays, stuck in the shadow

of his big brother, Aaron, a basketball star.

So, he takes to gaming-day and night,

setting up in the basement below,

putting on his own virtual gaming show.

He is surrounded by a shroud of fog

Condensed from a sea of an ill society…

Hovering in a haze-his face reflects flat purple-

off the screen’s bright display.

Little brother punches the keyboard

click, clack, dat-ta, tat

Da, da, click, clack, dat-ta, tat…

shooting to score points of mundane matter

raining back down on his empty platter.

But the points he scores are fuzzy

while the numbers are high, they read 33,126

Pixels fade, then radiate; fade, then radiate glow

Icons flip on

screens that snicker as light bulbs flicker.

He jerks the joystick left,

right, and straight.

He keeps on it-right, left, straight,

the score calculates…

Pixies play above pixels

Icons tower over top scores

Emojis smile, frown, and surprise

They groan, distort, retort in bright display

They dance on the screen, well, not really dance

But shift and blink and flash over and over again

On the court:

playing for the Dons, Aaron shoots, Swish, and scores!

Shoot, swish, and scores again-making points count!

Dons: 36, Spartans: 21

Rumbles reverberate from the roar of the crowd

Society cheers, jumping up and down

Wooden floorboards rattle, announcing to the city by the bay

a small civil-celebratory quake

is in play-escalating Aaron’s status to lord of the Dons

While-

Back at home, his little brother nibbles on Cheese Nips

Sitting safe and sound

Tapping the keys underground, twisting &

Clawing to tame the virtual beast

That bestows him by day and into the night

Little brother reaches for the joystick-but where is the joy?

Big brother shoots and scores some more…

Lost, he:

He swims in a social soup-

A whirlpool

Surrounds him…

Sending him friend requests

Warm and fuzzy, in theory.

He dips his toes in

From time to time

Swirling his feet in the psylicon-sand

Info-bytes bubble up

Unscrambling the code of the ocean

Virtually-

Rocking the mainframe

Causing tech-tonic shifts

Sending tsunamis across cyber continents

where societal storms blow across the surface, squalling

Wind waves of wonder

A cauldron of opinion travels swiftly

Comment to comment

From the rebound of the second information age

From the forest of the mainframe

Toward the tides of tyranny

Into the spam of software worn scandals

Eroding into pixie hard drive dust

Where gold assets are left behind

And Bitcoins pave the way

The glitter of silver and bits of gold construct its interior

But lose its value in the digital madness of zeros and ones

Where transmission sizzles hot…

Then Evaporates

To form precipitous clouds

Storing bytes and bytes

Of vapor

raining back down on the

Mad Hatters that catch the crazies

On their platters

Will he be ready for the wave?

Will it lift him up and throw him on his back?

Marking his individuality with a number

Branding his digital religion

Pinning him to a concrete metric-an infinite algorithm that never ends-like pi

An eternally repeating decimal,

Jack’s beanstalk in the sky

He will keep his wit-coins about him: personal, health, and financial

He won’t let it be his whim, but yours!

He cherishes his magic beans

So they may sprout in his sandy garden

With ice plants and beads of dew

Settling on salty ridden air-searching for

real soil and weeds that climb to his porchlight

He centers his CPU

Where its servers cook up big ideas

And spit them out like taffy

Chewable

Undeniable

Exposed

Will he have chips or wafers for lunch?

We urge him to drop the joystick

And take up surfing

Along the wispy shores and sandy dunes

He waxes up his board

With his viral shield and rides it out

into the frozen ice cream headache waves

Salty and swirly, sand saturates his hair

As he gets thrown onto the shore and into the dry sand

With numb fingers and an icicle nose, he realizes

He is not cut out for surfing waves in the ocean

So, he returns to his basement

To thaw out from the cold and escape

An unforgiving Pacific shore

Over OB’s dunes he shuffles home

He returns to drink that familiar grog with crunch wafers

And blue-green ribbon-strip jerky

He takes a sip of the that-oh, so familiar techno soup-feeling right at home.