Cyberpunk

Despite being emotionally out of sorts, I have been writing all sorts of interesting stuff. I went to a 'writing marathon' and one of the exercises was with a poet who is one of our tutors. He got us using a style called 'cut up', a strange attempt to reconstruct reality invented by William S. Burroughs and it was interesting what came out of a short free write about a recurring dream; an article about the movement of stars; and the humane device for killing crustaceans. I took a piece of the short story 'Cyberpunk', a piece of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat and a piece I wrote about reading on the bus to school, and came up with sixteen lines of poetry: now I have to think of a title! I don't know how it works as a poem, but it was great fun to write.

Out of my sleepsack, cyberpunking to purgatory

Seven miles on the transys to school

The seat was booby trapped, apple carts

Spinning wheels on the way out of the prefabs

Sprawling over the hill, Jerry built, no really,

Custom built from the motherboard up by POW’s

Enslaved to the corporation, greentoothed,

From the red-eyes hollowness of the war.

Easing myself into the planet machine

Deep in the book, following Jim DiGriz

Down the stainless steel sewers, a bug

Oozing into the programme, no-one flags on us

The right salute, the right uniform, corporate zombies

Charming the drones, tough program to crack,

On-line in nano’s, blew a chip, shut down fast

On the seven ten bus from the end of the line.