Over the course of several years since 2017 I wrote a series of poems about the sense of having "quiet places" online. Comfortable, melancholy, desperate, hopefully, despairing, lonely, content, raging into the void, terrified, frustrated, swirling in the placelessness of existence in the digital fringes. I've collected them here, and written one more, the day the shutdown announcement happened. Maybe these mean something to someone else, maybe not. It's all okay, no matter what the words may feel
THERE ARE STILL QUIET PLACES ONLINE
There are still quiet places online
Drives humm softly
Counters tick slowly
Screens don't pulse or flash
Soft glow, dim cyan burn-in on LCD panes
There are still quiet places online
Visitors are few
Visitors are none
No one stays to say hello
But all still are welcome
There are still quiet places online
They're not forgotten
They're not alone
They're not gone
They're not dead
There are still quiet places online
And they are not empty
There are still quiet places online
And they're listening
WERE THERE EVER QUIET PLACES ONLINE?
Were there ever quiet places online?
Was the buzz of information in the air in the wires ever calm?
Did the screaming infinite, the overstimulated superhighway ever placid?
Were they only still as death instead?
Fleeting spark. Hours of a voice.
Decades to smother murmuring screens
Never Last seen [* * *]
Were there ever quiet places online?
THERE ARE NO MORE QUIET PLACES ONLINE
There are no more quiet places online
Infinite noise screaming miasma
Dead, empty, forgotten silence
But there are no quiet places online
There were those
There were before
But there are no more quiet places online
You are of endless among volume inconceivable
You are nothing in the stillness unreachable
Link
Rot
Link
Rot
TEEMING
SCREAMING
DECAY CANNOT TREAD
ANAEROBIC
CHOKED
Croaked
There are no more quiet places online
But we're all still here, aren't we?
THERE ARE AGAIN, QUIET PLACES ONLINE
There are again, quiet places online
But this quiet comes only with an ending
It comes only when there is signal no more
But before there is no one left
Before the silence, there was sound
Before the quiet, there was a roar
But then, the purse-seinne closes
But oh, oh how we sang
Not as one, not a gathering choir
But we, so raucous together, as then before
We saw the end, we knew the score
We walked among the quiet places online
And our hearts hung heavy, say farewells
There are still quiet places online
