“My Funny Valentine”
I was your first Email,
yourfirst ICQ message,
your one and only ISP.
Before I came along
You was a virtual virgin;
innocent, excited by my Pentium,
and full of fear.
Even though I prepared you
and installed only
1.6 gigabytes
the first time,
You was still afraid—
waiting nearly two weeks
before you dared
logging on alone.
I was patient with you;
holding your hand,
I never pushed too hard.
Now, two and a half years later
you can't get enough of me.
Your hard drive is humming,
your modem is buzzing,
and you can't sleep.
You found yourself begging
for more.
Slowly, expertly, I complied;
loading an upgrade of power
into your system,
injecting more memory and speed
like some exotic drug
I administer on demand.
(I brought you up to
4.8 and 32 and smiled.)
Don't think it goes unnoticed
how I feed your passion,
like candy to an addict
one piece at a time.
I gave you
16 megabytes of RAM
for your birthday,
an electronic greeting card,
a web site,
plus sporadic email
and my tempting knowledge
in byte-sized portions, still.
I have changed your life
and charged your mind,
and now you are writing a book—
“The Yearning Years:
The story of a woman
who falls in love
with her
Internet Service Provider”
— to be published, of course,
after we're all dead.
If Y2K crashes
the rest of the world in the meantime,
it won't affect you.
You will have filed and saved
your memories of me,
transcribed into poetry
on old-fashioned paper
hidden beneath the mattress
of your bed.
For posterity,
for millennia to come,
for unsuspecting
computer users
of the future,
that they may know
the joy that you
have found.
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