A Surfer's Lament

I feel myself reaching out anonymously,
comfortable,
sliding into the vastness
of cyberspace
touching an accelerated mindscape where I
close off to shelves around me piled high.

It's a sad state to need this
collaboration
with artificial reality to get my kicks
when not long ago I was
climbing mountains, trekking deserts and
drinking too long at smokey jazz joints.
Put it down to responsibility.

Have I let the cold hand
of commercial coercion
play me?
Drag me along with the eternal promise of
consumerist, middle-class, underachievement
mortgage, marriage, child and career.
Comfortable discomfort.

I look around for the disappointment
hidden between this comfort zone and the
camcorders
but my schoolmates are trading up to
three kids or a Mercedes
and I feel
disembowelled, cheated.

So I go back to the anonymous zone
silent, flash, interact with whobody -
comfort.
The World In There is created
juxtaposed to the World Out Here.
The marketers, the gamers, the IT junkies, the dreamers.
deliberate or not.

Yet the World In There is never free
from reality's interventions,
DisComfort
as the phone rings.
What were once rivulets of escapism
now rise up as chains shaped like
telephone cords and computer cables.

Tomorrow they'll be bars, tentacles
confining me
holding back my thoughts, desires, voice, actions,
sliding 'round my hands, pressing
contraptions to my mouth.
Suffocation,
and a new day.