The Virtual Epiphany of Byron Dill
…extract…Byron Dill reviews his dislocated life.
It lies in pieces beneath his shaking hand.
For all his cleverness and sleight,
For all his smart-alec schemes,
Here in the blank moment
They unravel:
Mere distractions,
Insubstantial threads,
Trains of thought a long time derailed.Byron Dill reviews a life beyond machines,
Considers how his virtual world
Could not inform the real,
Sees that what he once believed invested,
Were talents buried, archived and hidden away,
His very essence mothballed and too fragile now
To see the light of day.Byron Dill sheds a virtual tear
For real emotion is remote from him.
He sighs a vicarious sigh
As he trawls his memories for something sound,
So much postponed,
So much put away,
So much justified,
So that what remains might just about
Be brought to light, in some polite society.Byron Dill is sleeping at his station.
In his mind’s eye he is walking in the hills.
It is an old rhythm that his limbs and bones are feeling
As he steps out on a track in the winter rain.
Night is falling as he goes down the path toward the river,
The wind is cold as it blows across his face.
On the bank, beside a ruined building,
He can see his wife and children waiting.
He remembers now that they are the reason he is here.Byron Dill reads the runes.
The computer programme reads out ‘Too late’
His stern advisers all around him say ‘ You cannot change.’
‘Prospects, security, and ripe old age,’ they whisper,
Like all the other counsels of deceit.
The normal world still gripping tight upon its homilies
Urges, ‘Too late, too old, too much at stake.’
But the universe, at his back, his one and only friend, reminds him
Touching a shoulder with a pulse that is older still,
As old as time and stars and the infiniteness of space,
The universe, too wry to be ignored, talks to his deepest heart:
‘Do what you will,’ it murmurs, ‘Do what you like,
For dust is dust.’© BH - 2000
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