Clicker in the Attic
With acknowledgement to Dylan Thomas’s
The Hunchback in the Park
Clicker in the attic
A computer Game fanatic
A solitary mister
Propped between monitor and wall
From his afternoon rising through all
That remained of the sun and through the night
Forehead flickering like elastic silver.
Eating rice from a plastic tray
Drinking coffee from a soiled cup
In the midnight hour that leached
A poisoned mist across his faded day,
Left the killing game to make
A woman figure without fault,
A leg from here, a breast from there
A pair of insincere pouting lips
From the call girls’ on-line graphics,
Light relief from his life’s great work
In the cyber fields where victims fell
To his rattling gun but there were always more.
All night in the unmade room
With aching thumbs and burning wrists
Hunchbacked in slavery
Onwards and upwards or starting again
He played the games that the traffickers sent
(With a tiny health warning on every disc).
After the models and the pouting
The war-paint the guns the jungle the swamp
The warrior women innocent as plastic
His body wracked with repetitive strain
He set out once more on his one-track dream —
With fingers that would not obey his brain.
In a mockery of tears he cried
All night in the terror of his failing
Cried for a month while the sun shone outside
Cried when the curtain fell off the rail.
When they carried him out in a plywood box
His fingers rattled on the lid like hail.
Page(s) 6
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