Kazaa

Post-Napster shut down,
we floundered, teenaged and poor,
having been banned from Columbia House
and BMG for signing up
for their introductory offer,
over and over,
brains craving more content,
hard drives with ample storage
for thousands of songs we'd never
listen to, and episodes of South Park
our parents wouldn't let us watch
on television.

Among the sea of P2P file-share programs
and torrent sites, we waded past the Limewires
and Pirate Bays, trying to outrun nastygram
notices from our vigilant Internet Service Providers,
before finally landing at the green gates
of Kazaa’s welcoming embrace.

Fine sharing was illicit, some dark secret
that every tech saavy teenager shared,
searching for boot leg action movies,
filmed via shaky hand cam and barely legible.
We'd watch, huddled together
in someone's basement while our heavy
desktops sat downloading more
content at home.

Until, one-by-one, the processors
slowed down, gummed up with content,
half of which was rife with virulent malware,
terrorizing our systems and compromising
our information.

Computers bricked,
or nearly unusable, we wept
while downloading and running malware
checkers and virus scanners to
root out and quarantine potential threats.
These pains, the ones associated
with heavy towers and boxy
monitors, stung as we watched
dial-up morph into DSL into cable.
Our game of media telephone,
passing burned disks to one another,
slowly petered out as streaming ate
its way through our digital-to-physical
methods leaving us hungry
for a sensation we'll never
replicate again.

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