The first mobile apps were gallows.
The imagineers who discovered the New World
built them everywhere they went.
It wasn’t enough merely to capture souls;
you had to add a glow of piety
& an instant patina of terribly original sin.
For their part, the Indios etched
& painted on the open-source platform
of their alluring skins:
here a bird, there another bird,
a painted-on smile around the lips
or a ladder of tears, tattooed down
the smooth touch-screen
of a still-warm cheek.
I live in an Appalachian hollow in the Juniata watershed of central Pennsylvania, and spend a great deal of time walking in the woods. Here’s a bio. All of my writing here is available for reuse and creative remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. For attribution in printed material, my name (Dave Bonta) will suffice, but for web use, please link back to the original. Contact me for permission to waive the “share alike” provision (e.g. for use in a conventionally copyrighted work).