[Newspoetry] Telco Ward

[Nick Montfort]

[Any suggestions for revisions? Please let me know. -NM]

It's such a good thing that the people who run Verizon run Verizon.

If they didn't, they might be doing something else.

They might be fucking my open wound in the emergency room instead of
whacking fiber-optic cable against their flagging cocks.

They might be preparing food, drooling into it as they pressed the glass
slivers that cut their own insensate fingers into the gobbets they were
about to serve.

They might be running over dozens of pedestrians in eighteen-wheelers,
tires whirring red over each pulped head for a moment, moaning like
orgasmic ocelots as they jerk their vehicles and leer at the shiny
controls in front of them.

But no -- fortunately, they are only eating weeks of people's lives; only
doing their part to bring down Western culture, to crash the commerce of
minds; squatting to turn what used to be called the Internet into a
rivulet of one-way corporate excrement; gibbering on in futility about the
final collapse of one leg of their intentionally crippled network --
described in detail for them by a person who waited on the phone for hours
as if it were the door to Kafka's Law, by a person who, rather than being
paid for expertise as a consultant usually is, pays a monthly fee for
degredation, insult, and white noise.

When you're fucked in the ass by a telephone company, and you turn your
head to the side through the tears, that's exactly what you see: the plane
of the ground straight up like the whole planet has been transformed into
an obstacle, a vertical horizon, a machine for grinding living human
thought into cubible prisons and sausages of suffering, the nadir --
Verizon!


-Nick Montfort                    We put the "er..." back into hypertext.
<www.nickm.com> <nickm at nickm.com>       The Ed Report. <www.edreport.com>