Scene 1: Humans Navigating
ORACLE
when life dawns on the glowing screen
and worlds emerge from in between
the glowing realms of lingual light
and murky depths of shimmering night
HONORIA
Dare we spell out and post illusions?
Invite spectacular confusion?
Magnetize a paradise
fantasize and rhapsodize
A web of spinning cyber tales
concealed in cryptic electronic-mails?
How long will I send my arrows into the cyber-dark
hoping that I’ll pierce alienation’s bulwark?
Cyber, Ciberspazio: So close you are at hand.
Do I move this little key and open up your land?
Cyber, Ciberspazio: So close you are at hand.
Do I move this little key and open up your land?
BOOKISH
Computing in this ergonomic chair
An oracle confronts me there
My heart is weak, my back’s aligned
My mind confused, my life, confined
Seeking refuge from my post-modern intellectualized scorn
found in a cyberspace without physical shape or form
shaped by my projection so immediate and exact
my heart and soul transformed in a single act
by the virtual tao that so strongly beats and flows!
infinite, interconnected energy from computer’s glow!
.REZ
He leads me on, light years away
through astral nights, galactic days
We span the globe – the nets’ furious fire
searching for digitized, rhapsodized desire.
ORACLE
No, Lovers, you’re all alone
No one’s out here, no one at home
There is only you and the machine
of love-in-minds the world is clean
There is only you and the machine
the world on-screen, remains pristine.
BOOKISH (dejected)
“Of love-in-minds the world is clean?”
Such “cleanliness”! It is obscene!
How come things to be so perverse
How can thing to be so reversed?
That the banal is clean and reality perverse?
Turned inward by ego, lust and greed
has man no where to turn in attempt to be freed?
from his inner grasping, clinging and desire
is the netted love mirrored, sinply man-made wire?
ORACLE
Your impassioned words fall upon deadened ears
as communication falls from poets to engineers.
SANDY
Can it be it’s already too late to appeal
the terms of this fausto-mcluhanesque deal
just so are the mediate appetites sated
Goddess knows I need it,
To love another I’ve never met in flesh.
It was not my intent to go all sotto voce,
To hold both melody and accompany,
To echo the pounding, the pounding of my own steady throb.
REZ
This diode crazy striptease bores me no end,
all these lewd faxes we receive and send.
All I want is a cyberspace donna not so mobile,
virginal and passionate, not a facsimile
of a femme fatale dot-matrixed, gone to seed.
Oh lady of the chips, fulfill my need
ORACLE
There is no one to return your love,
no Venus to aid you from above.
It matters not how hard you seek
no love awaits for thee, hopeless geek.
HONORIA
What’s next in hypertext please be slow and sweet,
untrammeled by hang-ups, by nerdiness unvexed.
As we four wander the by-ways and back alleys
mapped for us on the information highways.
SANDY
I long for a heavy-humming master-ess
To rid us of this schlepping slurping static-y insect!
If one pauses to dissect its too-vivid forebodings,
Perhaps to pluck its buzzing wings like a budding tomboy,
One hears it deploy no notes,
For it plays no part in life’s quiet cacophony.
Visit us, cyborg, and silence this brine-spilled oracular dolt!
ORACLE
Woe, woe, to you, a thousand times woe
Love does not down the Information highway go.
The software comes through the wire
whether the PC survives or dies,
Internet’s barbed words in wire and sighs,
Stacheldraht des XXI jahrhundert
in gefangenschaft einsames herz
Alambre de espino del siglo XXI.
Barbed wire of the future cries.
Barbed wire of the future sighs.
.REZ
Bleak, bleak, bleak is my life.
Shall I ever find the cyberwife?
I do so strive to find my certain cyber-soulmate,
whose keys can click with mine on a virtual first date.
But will I discover my lasting partner, a love archival,
Or instead the doub’ly disguised e-mails of my archrival?
ORACLE
You have received at last Love’s final veto,
and sex will not serve to power up your magneto.
Unless you seek, you can’t compile.
Your fear will freeze you for a while.
I remind you of the method how, sir,
You can’t carouse without a browser.
SANDY
This crucible of sound and light
calls us out in cries of night
to refract, recontextualize,
each given name, each birth disguise.
Social categories in co-creations
of gender, sexuality and desire,
mask in femme and of relations
engendered transmother and transire.
BOOKISH
I type your name, I load your page,
invoke the daimons of our age,
and wonder, as I reach your view,
if I can meet the real you,
if you, in flesh instead of fire,
could ever sense my dream’s desire.
ORACLE
Ha!
For you there is no whore of Babylon
nor secret entrance into Love’ pylon.
HONORIA
A distillation of loveless loners
attracts resisting mutual donors
who occupy virtual spaces full of conceit
then with all ten fingers burning, reach for delete.
I freeze, before Cyberspazio, in some Khyber Pass
between hardware and printer, and a half-full wineglass,
BOOKISH
The screen is filled, page after web-bed page,
with the longing of B-cup, obviously underage.
Oh! But of B-cup filled with such balanced insight!
a fighter, compassionate, critical and bright.
ORACLE
Weep, you fool, weep your eyes out
No partner for thee, despite your cybershout!
Your posts show you as comedians
your love life reveals you as tragedians.
HONORIA
This thread of time and space we weave
digital uncertainty. We sift and sieve
a domain of intellect and higher thought.
The vibrant community we always sought
lacks only the touch of typing fingers
whereby, wistfully through sweet transmissions, we linger
longing for our print to take shapely form
to be our otherself, loving and warm.
Above the node-to-node interplay of plot
indistinct clouds loom, heavy and hot
portending fulfillment of human dream
circumventing, transcending this inner scream.
Some omniscient presence watches over us
awe-inspiring, huge, tremendous
soon, coded curtains will part and reveal
the ultimate being, flesh and steel.
Imagination does not bond it,
universal truth, love, heart, wit.
ORACLE
Cyberspace Lost Aria
Of Cyborg’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Wire, whose electric taste
Brought life into the Net, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Repress us, and regain the blissful PC,
Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret laptop
Of Apple, or of Sun, didst inspire
That Programmer, who first wrote the chosen Code,
In the Beginning how the virtual Heav’n and Earth
Rose out of the ArpaNet. I thence
Invoke thy aid to my advent’rous Post,
That with no editing intends to soar
Above the cyberspace, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in DOS or Rhyme,
That to the utopia of this great argued Net
I may assert benev’lent Anarchy
And supersede the ways of Gods and men.