Ten Weeks (Or, Nineteen
Persons Caught Within a Net
On the Crystal Soup)
- for Leslie Lopez and the participants of ITE 401 -
There wasn’t much danger of getting dry or wet
for nineteen persons caught within that net.
Some feared bad lighting would reduce their sight to squints,
or that their home would dissolve into filaments.
Could happen…but it hadn’t happened yet.
They couldn’t view the mechanics behind each click,
nor had they much leisure to ponder how things stick –
whether existence had some webby glue
facilitating commerce between false and true,
or if that glue’s consistency was thin or thick.
They had no borders cut of sky or coast,
but this wasn’t their undoing – it was their boast!
For they gathered their world not in sweeps but in bites,
and they gathered it all up, with their rights,
through directives they received each week in the post.
In such a world, it’s true, there was much for to yearn –
just so much as there was little to spurn!
No sheen of a colorful world behind each fence,
no distractions for the fidgeting brows of sense.
They only knew they’d entered here to learn.
Winding their pilgrim’s way to the end of the loop,
they wondered to themselves, had they become a group?
They’d soon desert this place ungemmed, unpearled.
Would they know themselves, each other in the “real” world?
Their cursors bobbed up and down on the crystal soup.
Time had come unwound on a shorter spool.
It was over before they’d learned of warm and cool.
How good to find themselves beneath a starry sky!
They were soaked, but there was nothing to dry
as one by one they emerged from their liquid school.