Warning the First: This is what happens when I read about Twitter coverage of the Iranian election and start thinking about Little Brother, Serenity, The Gone-Away World and The X-Files in confluence. (With apologies to Cory Doctorow, Joss Whedon, Nick Harkaway and Chris Carter.)
Warning the Second: I am a giant geek.
Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin.
spooks in the machine
& in my head I hear them shouting –
Take it back! wrote Doctorow; & as the smoke
of bloody bombs and tiger-fires lights the way,
young fingers dance a typeset revolution, row on row, and say! –
don’t updates sound like Mr Universe? You cannot stop the signal.
True. Technology’s an everloving curse.
The youth are fighting back. From pens & swords
we battle guns & tweets; and shockingly the old wives’ mandate
(tell it to the bees) has proven true:
the hivemind waits, a hydra craving news.
The truth is out there. All along the pipe of pipes,
we raise a cry: the The FOX is going up!
& when we look and look again
there is no lie, no crawling, poor excuse to tell
that begs our ignorance of broken men,
the brimstone-charred apologists of hell.
Words thrive in spaces other norms refuse: they
grow like ivy, breed like mushrooms, eat the smart refuse
of dreams, & when the firewalls are trashed
they revel in it: long live youth! whose busy thumbs in World War III
(should trenches ever come again, & schnapps, & soccer skirting bombs)
might save the Christmas Truce!
shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows 