Shadow

What have I become, this fenced in suburban jerk with 1.3 kids, a white veneered home, name brand khakis, and a job at the bank. I’ve become a shadow of the reality I long to taste, a robot trying to algorithimize emotion. I am merely the byproduct of a digital evolution. My sea of tranquility is filled with acid, my atmosphere is perforated by the necessities I want, my oxygen is cut down to buy apartment complexes at obscene rates so that on Saturday night, when I’m hanging out with the people I don’t like, from the job which I hate, eating at a place Bill Gates would consider outrageous, I can discuss the property I somewhat own and its meaninglessness worth and finally fit in with the people I already established that I hate. I am the shadow of a once existing man, now so scarcely alive I might as well be dead. I function only on what my digital self does in its futuristic hell-hole of a world, for I am his shadow. I have exited the world of beauty, into the second hand creation of programmed computerization. This world of today has me looking up at my former shadow, now in full form as I have dwindled to its mimicking black state gliding along through what I can only assume to be hell, trying in vain to recapture the beauty I have lost. In this world I am all that I dreamed of in my nightmares, living in the so-called land of the free, where this disclaimer is true. “You now enter paradise where no man goes hungry, but all starve, the refuge for the homeless, in which all live on the streets, the land of the wealthy, where all beg, the land of Christianity, in which all men are hypocrites, and the land of the free, where all men wear chains.” It was I who fastened my chains, and I who threw away their key. I bound myself to my shadow and die in this treacherous dream. I have no pulse, nor breath in me as I wander around chasing my shadow as it dances about in digital hell and I follow it to our doom. I pretended once that I alone was the master of my fate, but I died by the hand of my once living self and am captured and left to die. You may find me one day hiding behind the sun following my shadow to our end, you might call out, but I cannot hear, deafened in my race to death so fast I didn’t even enjoy this place. I am a shadow now a by-product of this humanist revolution, and I urge you to shed your tears for me. For I locked myself in with no escape to a place I cannot be, trapped inside suburbia and no one can hear my screams.