Elegy for a ProBoards Forum

– For Bob, Kyle, Kenny, Justin, Amy, and Rob

God, how I miss The Goat Pen,
when I was a teenager and the worst president we thought we’d ever have was W.,
and the internet wasn't an endless ad for the apocalypse;
how it was the place I found kinship with two relative loners my age in Wisconsin and Cali
over a love of Final Fantasy and crafting stories where half the villains turned out to be doofuses, 
and talking goldfish and random house fires were comedy bits,
and one of us would bend the plot to give himself an excuse to flex his coding
or write some truly stupid songs for laughs.
We retconned and roleplayed video game characters daily: 
Rinoa now a vainglorious sorceress with her ridiculous cult;
once-homicidal, Sephiroth just another schmo managing a bookstore;
and all the overly-lionized “heroes” gained a newfound liberty to not give a damn;
the world, largely saved and ludicrous.
We stayed up hours to plunge the depths of each other’s flailing minds
and navigate the minefields of adolescence over AIM,
suicidal, alcoholic, disaffected, girl-crazed, or depersonalized,
we typed through all of it. For these strangers, closer than schoolmates,
I flew across the country twice to roadtrip from one home to the other.
For me, they wrote their shares of a novel that will probably never be published,
but which still brings me joy; a collaboration where every character I made –
even the assholes—was some facet of me I needed to figure out. 
They built a world for me, and now, the forum where it all went down is a ghost town,
and the places most people, myself included, gather online are full of double-talk,
political manipulation, and marketing. 
It's enough to make you want to die, and I get the feeling that's kind of the point: 
desperate people are easiest to exploit, and how better to drive despair 
than to pave over paradise, yet again.
For chrissakes,
even Big Yellow Taxi cuts to a DraftKings spot on YouTube, 
but that kind of proves Joni's point after all, doesn't it?

Gabriel Cleveland is a poet and fiction writer with an MFA in Creative Writing from Pine Manor College and currently serves as the Managing Editor for CavanKerry Press. An avid video gamer and music lover, Gabriel is also a mental health advocate, often working online to raise awareness, visibility, and money for psychological and psychosocial issues. He has spent several years in the field of caregiving for people with increased physical and/or mental needs and wants you to know that you’re not alone.