Date: Wednesday, October 13, 1999, 11:00:46 AM
Subject: The Death of a Cyber-Hick..
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(from a Tasmanian polemicist)
This is a poem I lifted form Ted Hughes. I could be about cyber-hicks…or
some other backward parochial cowboys. Cyberspace is like Texas, brash,
crass, marginal full of new-money oil barrens who think that they own
everything they see, until they position themselves in discourses outside
of their box and they realise that they are mere weeds in an anthill,
lacking nourishment from
boater intellectual and cultural engine rooms, thus they will shrivel up
and die.
The Death of a Cyber-Hick…
Once upon a time
There was a person
Running for his life.
This was his fate.
It was a hard fate.
But Fate is Fate.
He had to keep running
He began to wonder about Fate.
And running for dear life.
Who? Why?
And was he nothing
But some dummy hare on a racetrack?
At last he made up his mind
He was nobody’s fool.
It would take guts
But yes he could do it.
Yes yes he could stop.
Agony! Agony!
Was the wrenching
Of himself from his running.
Vast! And sudden
This stillness
In the empty middle of the desert.
There he stood- -stopped.
And since he couldn’t see anybody
To North or to West or to East or South
He raised his fists
Laughing in awful joy
And shook them at the Universe
And his fists fell off
And his arms fell off
He staggered and his legs fell off
It was too late for him to realise
That this was the dogs tearing him to pieces
That he was, in fact, nothing
But a dummy hare on a racetrack.
And life was being lived only by the dogs.
Ted Hughes.