He probably had Virginia Madsen in mind when I was writing this.

Life  Putting Christmas decorations away the other day, I stumbled upon a bag of papers which had been bunged on a shelf during a clear out and completely forgotten about.  They're a mess of old GCSE and A-Level essays and scripts and other bits and bobs and I thought I'd embarrass myself or at least give myself a dose of perspective and post them up here in the coming weeks.

And so to the seventeen year old version of me in the first year of his A-Levels.  He's a lunchtime prefect in charge of the school computer room and has been studying John Donne for three months.  Both of these facts are the only way to account for the following attempt at metaphysical poetry using some kind of weird computer metaphor. He probably had Virginia Madsen in mind when he was writing this. 

Notice the dot-matrix printing.  If ink-jet had been invented then, the school certainly couldn't afford it.  He must have typed it in using 1st Word Plus running on one of the school's many Acorn Archimedes machines though goodness knows how he managed it without being spotted by one of kids in there playing the Lander demo.  Until he banned them for playing games.

ELECTRIC DREAMS

As I deliver mail around our offices

So your computer pulses, telling its circuits what to do.

And as your fingers caress the keyboard

I wonder if one day I'll do the same to you.

The emerald words upon the screen which

Contrast against the bold azure within your eyes

Are as hidden from me as the

Thoughts you hold within your mind.

The smile you gave me as I passed

Is stored within my memory for all time.

And the warmth of coffee upon my leg

Is like the verve I feel within my heart.

Your voice is all I can hear

As the carriage liaises with the page,

And so the tape spools through the cartridge,

Your words flow into my mind.

As a socket gives your computer the power to process

So your touch has made me electric.

And as we dance I feel more than your caress

I feel your love as well.

The register opens as you have

Opened your heart to me.

And as I am given just my change

I hope I will not take more than I should receive.

The touch of your lips against mine

Is like a turtle without a shell.
And so a hacker violates a network

Am I violating you?

Our language now is faster

Than that between any terminals,

Our thoughts being a database

Of all we need to know.

Stuart Burns L6A1.

[The first four lines of the final stanza are just awful though to be fair to him, he probably wasn't aware of the implications.  He'd led a very sheltered life, what with going to an all boys school.  Either that or he'd been reading the Donne a bit too well.  This Turtle would have been the source of the imagery.  See what I mean?]