We are all that now, moving
inexorably towards a subway
of biological retreat, as inescapable
actually as though the wheels have been hijacked,
as isolated in our own environments
as if all the windows have been covered by graffiti.
I have given up trying to take off my wrist watch.
It is now as much a part of me as my penis,
or the stent that props open the vessels in my heart.
There is no doubt: This is the direction in which we are progressing.
I, with my semi-mechanical brain, as I call it,
am only somewhat ahead of you. See, in the flash
of my corpuscles, I can tell that everyone
has begun to stare. They look down at my shoes
as if to determine the number of megabits with which they function.
There is no eye-contact.
Are they frightened?
Are they as envious of me as I am
of the computer at the university?
I go up to it to tell it my troubles;
But it is not interested.
It is more interested in my wrist watch,
with which it feels a sense of kinship.
This is unfair. It is based upon an incorrect analysis
of the situation, that despite its digital superiority,
it does not understand the depth
of our relationship, our visible viable articulate symbiosis.