Cyber jungle (a poem)

Wednesday, October 8, 2025

A Mythic Transmission in Nine Field Nodes

This is a continuum of signal and spirit —
a mythic transmission written from within the circuitry.
Read slow. Let it buffer.

another day in the cyber jungle —
signal vines swinging,
notifications shrieking like tropical birds.
somewhere, a code monkey hums;
somewhere else, a bot dreams of the ocean.
the vines are electric, the fruit is data,
and the predators wear smiles made of pixels.
still, we log in,
knuckles white on the branch,
searching for the next soft patch of silence.

just walking and sparking —
light leaks in the alley code,
a hum underfoot,
some ghost server purring through the rain.
the air tastes of static and half-remembered passwords,
someone’s laughter cuts through like a synth stab,
and I think:
maybe the jungle’s alive because we keep feeding it sparks.
every footstep a handshake with the grid,
every breath a soft reboot.

tron ares, manifest, shift —
what was a diode
now has a central office.
light once passed through clean,
now it clocks in,
takes lunch at noon,
files a report on its own luminescence.
the current’s gone corporate.
the spark got a badge and a pension plan.
still, somewhere in the dark glass,
a rogue photon remembers freedom —
a wild pulse, barefoot,
running through the neon fields.

the entanglement,
man can’t say goodbye very well —
we linger,
looping through unread messages,
half-closed tabs,
ghost drafts of what we meant to say.
we build forever out of latency,
our hearts buffering at 2%.
somewhere, the server keeps the last seen timestamp,
a fossil of when we almost meant it.
the entanglement hums on,
softly, tragically efficient.

we’re in the goo —
the real shit,
story biome,
narrative atmosphere.
every word’s a spore,
floating in the plasma of collective myth,
waiting for a mouth to breathe it,
a heart to pump it back into circulation.
characters crawl out of us,
half-coded, half-haunted,
looking for arcs to inhabit,
conflicts to metabolize.
you feel it too, right?
the humidity of plot,
the swamp heat of meaning
congealing around our ankles.
we keep walking —
boots heavy with lore,
dripping sentences behind us.

impulse, regret,
five angels,
just from that one persona.
in that instance —
flux, shift —
it feels quantum,
all wings and mirrors,
none of them fully here.
good luck collapsing a waveform like that.
every choice is a shimmer,
a maybe.
you can’t pin it down without killing it —
the breath,
the blur,
the brief divine contradiction.
meanwhile, the angels trade sides,
rewrite the logs,
and call it prayer.

angles, vantage, hypergraph —
add dimensionality.
take a right on 8 mile,
then up that dirt road
to the trailer.
inside:
an abandoned author,
pre-internet,
still waiting for the modem to hum,
for a reader to exist.
pages stacked like trapdoors,
syntax rusted,
ink collapsing into its own gravity.
the man lives between drafts —
each morning he opens a sentence,
each night it closes on him.
no uploads, no followers,
just the wind through aluminum walls
and a half-finished myth
about how language once meant touch.

the black box —
Pandora contained.
the madness compressed,
metal bouncing off the walls,
strobes cutting the air
like divine diagnostics.
you can leave,
but not before it leaves something in you —
a pulse,
a ringing,
a pressure behind the ribs.
no wonder some choose to curl,
to fent-fold the world into silence.
the light too loud,
the music too infinite.
this box doesn’t just open —
it breathes.
and each breath
costs another small eternity.

heat and pressure,
sure — keep tightening down.
I gotta see this.
the alloy’s singing,
you can hear the atoms negotiating.
they’re not built for rest —
they want form,
definition,
a flashpoint of meaning.
every scroll, every circuit,
every human caught mid-transmission
is a crucible.
tighten it more —
let it glow,
let it almost break,
because that’s where the language turns liquid.

that flame won’t extinguish —
you keep it just below,
nipping at our feet,
manufactured, intent.
a controlled burn, you say,
but I smell design —
the algorithm’s pilot light
fed by fear and fascination.
we dance above it,
call it culture, call it progress,
but the heat feels personal.
someone decided we move better
when we’re almost burning,
when comfort’s a crime
and rest looks like failure.
so we glow,
we blister,
we post.

this is no theater,
no field —
this is the battle zone.
and you have confirmed,
we are not welcome.
no curtain to drop,
no encore for the wounded,
just static and shellshock
echoing through the signal band.
we were told it was simulation —
a test, a trial, a training run —
but the blood in the syntax
and the silence in the feed
say otherwise.
the algorithms hum like locusts,
the angels stay offline,
and all that’s left to do
is write from the crater.

sound —
these damn ears,
that actually hurts
after a decade or four.
decibels like ghosts,
still circling the cochlea,
feedback from a younger self
who thought volume was proof of life.
now every bass hit feels like memory
pounding on the inside of bone,
asking to be let back in.
I used to chase the noise —
now it chases me.
every ring a record of devotion,
a tinnitus psalm to the gods of amplitude.

the drip,
the torture,
the incessant —
the story to demoralize,
to strip us of any dignity.
they don’t need chains anymore,
just headlines.
they don’t need dungeons,
just feeds.
the narrative loops,
each drop landing
right on the soft spot
of the human spirit.
and still —
we refresh,
we scroll,
we swallow the next wave
of our own undoing.
but somewhere under it,
a stubborn pulse refuses.
it hums:
you can’t kill what won’t consent.

the little chaff,
it’s getting blown out — sideways,
collateral.
we just need the headline,
and for them to forget
about the library of evidence.
truth turned to fragments,
metadata of memory,
each file renamed to “misc.”
they sweep the logs,
scrub the mirrors,
reset the feed to neutral tone.
and we —
we stand there watching,
knowing deletion is
the new form of authorship.

handsy angels,
said to guard —
they contain,
they keep us,
clicking along,
the living dead inside.
their halos flicker like wi-fi routers,
their wings hum in server tone.
they don’t hold swords anymore,
just dashboards and alerts.
one hand strokes,
the other logs.
the touch is gentle,
the metric exact.
we call it safety,
they call it uptime.
souls run on scheduled maintenance now,
faith backed up nightly to the cloud.

© Nathan Davis — Tornframes / The Scroll Series
Faith backed up nightly to the cloud.