Screen Savior

by Vincent Miskell
 

Imagine you will be cut and pasted
into paradise
but only if the right screen savior
is displayed and left behind
high in memory—
only if your fonts are truetype
and the windows to your soul
always load properly on rebooting—
a rescue disk may recover
your essential properties
but just one corrupted file
could fragment you all to hell.
It’s now time to save yourself
or perhaps to scan
your heart drive for errors
or go online for antiviral updates.
Performing an illegal operation
may cause an immediate shutdown—
so gather your data while you may.
Paradise’s site display may say
access denied—
then all your electrons get fried away
like an atmosphere appearing suddenly
on the moon
and your system crash-lands
into a void
some sages call nirvana.

About the Author

Vincent Miskell is an educator, currently a writing and critical thinking instructor at the Orlando campus of the University of Phoenix.  His poetry and parodies have appeared in Mobius, The Lyric, Star*Line, Scavenger's (a first-prize winner), and in the anthology in Poetic Voices of America (a fifth-prize winner).  His short fiction has appeared in Rosebud, online at InterText and in the science fiction anthology The Age of Wonders.  The September issue of ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION magazine is out; on page 21 is my satirical poem "Widow of the Android-Robot Time Wars." Most Barnes & Nobles and Borders' bookstores should carry one or two copies. Take a look.

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