Digital Citizen

the digital citizen is part

of the new world order

 

but Sochi is still a billion

miles from the reservation

on the west side of the river

 

the Kuban Cossacks are not

the same as the descendants

of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse

 

the interwebs might be the

great social equalizer in terms

of regional, political and

ethnic variation but the world

outside the digital, the binary,

the technical, the electrical

is totally divergent from the

one inside the glowing box

 

the house next door is as

alien as the far side of a

single-panel comic strip

 

so Sochi is the other side

of the universe from the

west side of the

great wet divide

 

one-hundred forty characters

in Cyrillic might as well be

one-hundred forty characters

in Klingon

 

taking a s**t is universal

behavior but it's not any

great social equalizer

 

Cyrillic s**t-takers can't talk

to English s**t-takers unless

there's a s**t-taker that's an

interpreter, a go-between

 

the world may be round

but it's hard to traverse,

physically and socially,

so the idea of a unified,

technocratic planet may

never come to fruition,

 

the digital citizen is

the closest realization

we have to that unity,

but that world is a

weird kind of physical,

an abstraction that depends

upon the electromagnetism

that animates the human body,

 

outside of that place,

the old norms of life,

the old technicalities,

the old nuances,

the old patterns,

the old customs

rule the regions

and that reality

may never change,

 

the tribes of the planes

will never mirror the

Russian orthodoxy

despite the fact that

the common cold virus

affects all similarly

 

no matter what the futuristic

optimists think, will and say,

pride of any kind never goes

before the greatest fall