The Love Song Of Count Prufrock Overdrive
Noi affermiamo che la magnificenza del mondo si è arricchita di una bellezza nuova:
la bellezza della velocità.
Un automobile da corsa col suo cofano adorno di grossi tubi simili a serpenti dall’alito esplosivo…
The sky was the color of a patient etherized on a table,
its ECG signalling a dead channel
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
While Stalked by assassins from one
of the nastier cartels.
Streets that follow like a complicated hack
with a double cross, and a slice of payback
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the razorgirls perambulate Talking of Machines that Cogitate.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
issued from a canister and several well-placed grenades
waved crazily at the terminals
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides through the server room,
Rubbing its back upon the keyboards;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the making of surgical incisions
In the room the razorgirls perambulate Talking of Machines that Cogitate.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a sawed off shotgun hidden beneath my jacket—
[They will say: “I thought he was too technical for this racket”]
My Ono-Sendai Cyberspace deck, my easily accessible flip flop switch
My jacket torn and modded, but asserted by a simple pin —
That has hidden somewhere a cunning bio-chip
Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
Shall I say, I have jacked in at dusk through illegal nets And penetrated the ten layers of ice that protect your property And am willing to come to a fair and equitable arrangement…
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cops, the shootouts, the bribery,
Among the simstims, among some talk of you and me,
and the artificially implanted memory,
should I have agreed to one last job,
To have squeezed the plastic explosive into a ball
To plant on some obsidian data bank,
To say: “This is for Finn, who you killed”
And feel the meaningless revenge still
the fears and excrement within.my head
to fill the future’s vistas with the possible
sunny beaches of retirement
And would it have been worth it, after all, Would it have been worth while, After the chases by a killer more machine than human, After the holography, after the digital stenography, after the skirts that trail along the floor — And this, and so much more? —
It is impossible to cryptoanalyse just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern graphed the biohacks on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If closing a bomb in a music box with a handmade screw,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“If I don’t make it back, You know what to do.”
I feel old… I feel old… I slip the chip into a hidden fold
Shall I dye my hair the color of a dead television?
I shall wear tactical combat gear.
and inject drugs in the cybernetic dolphin
in payment for information
I have seen the AIs moving through the Net Communicating in crypto and millisecond time differentials I do not think they will communicate with me
And yet, And yet — One looked at me with eyes of mirror And in the momentary terror
I knew that they knew what we knew
and knew that knowledge was part of some plan that was too vast and intricately crafted for the all too linear mind of man
and by this I was relieved
A Playlist for the Love Song of Count Prufrock: