Cold Cathodes

I have seen the digital
artifacts at the corners
of all the faces in
my dreams

I have seen the whole
of our experience
ride, teeth set,
into the uncanny
valley

Awake in the night,
I have peered at
my own blurred
reflection,
afraid to put on
my glasses,

For fear that, in
my own face, I would
recognize the haze
and pixellation of
a computer-generated
image,

For fear that, sometime
in the night, when
the servers are backed
up and virtual
computers are reallocated
to new machines,

I have become something
else, something
synthetic beneath the
flicker of my fluorescent
lights and cold cathodes.

That I am no longer
anything more than
a facsimile of what I
was.

Patrick M. Tracy

7/3/12