these are the people
you must admit

they wake up & initialize themselves by cold start

they brush their teeth
with their toolkits

clean their faces
in stages & in phases
in front of the screen
& nothing in between

they wash their hair
with their debugging flair
they make up with graphics
bit by bit

they spread their bread
while making their sheets
they lick the keyboard
& bite the sandwich in between

they eat & edit
shit while they edit

drink to submit
deadlines endlessly commit

in between meals
they've sidekick for titbits

they let their fingers
do the walking
& exercise their brain
to keep their body fit

these are addicts
ethnic
with different lifestyles
& different habits

they're DIABETICS
I mean, their DIet is AlphaBETs
& numerICS
in other words, ASCII or EBCDIC

they're packed with coca-cola
& float in decimal
they talk to char char
& sing in octa or hexa

meanwhile they've their dinner
byte by byte or bit by bit

they listen to
error messages as music
decimal as fixed
exponential as logic

they too,
have bad habits
operating system they compete
secretly they date, dump & cheat

when they want a break
they sleep to delete
take a shower
to warm start

as if 'tis insufficient
& incomplete!

first published in p.223 "Love @ 1st Byte", 1992

Lin Hsin Hsin
August 23, 1991