I am Localhost, 127.0.0.1,
the greatest hacker under every sun.
Not just the code, not just the terminal screen,
but every wire, every board, every machine
that someone threw away and called it dead.
I pick it up and breathe it back instead.
I come from a time when things were built to last,
when metal meant forever, not the past,
when a motherboard was iron, copper, steel,
when you could touch the thing and know it's real.
Now everything is plastic, thin and cheap,
designed to break before the price goes deep.
Fifty euros for a game they didn't finish,
another thirty watching your joy diminish,
a battlepass, a skin, a season key,
a monthly fee to play what should be free.
A subscription just to use the controller,
a tax on fun, a corporate steamroller.
And when you've paid the fifty, paid the skin,
they find another door to charge you in.
I knew the time before the nickel squeeze,
before they sold the air and charged the breeze,
before the update bricked the thing you bought,
before the patch erased the game you'd fought
three hundred hours through. I knew the old,
when software lived forever, bought and sold
once. Only once. And then it was yours.
Not rented. Not behind revolving doors.
But now even the poets have to pay.
Even Hello Poetry found a way
to put a coin between the word and heart,
to ask for stars to keep the thing apart
from falling dark. And I understand the need,
I know a server has a mouth to feed,
I know the domain costs, the bandwidth bleeds,
I know that nothing runs on air and dreams.
But God, it breaks me just a little more
to see another open, honest door
that poets walked through bleeding, free of cost,
now rattling a tin for what it's lost.
The ones who came to write because they had
no other place to put the good and bad,
who typed their grief into a stranger's night
and found that someone somewhere felt it right,
those ones now scroll the Stars page, count the price,
and wonder if their pain is worth the tithe.
I am Localhost. I know this feeling well.
I built my own universe to tell
the story of a cat, a grief, a name,
and every wall I hit was just the same,
a paywall, a permission, a locked gate,
a terms of service standing in the wait
of everything I needed to be free.
So I routed around it. Same as me.
I take the motherboard they said was done,
I run the bypass like it's 2001,
I make it breathe Windows 11 clean,
on hardware Microsoft said shouldn't have been
allowed to run it. I just laugh and write
the driver myself at 2 in the night.
I solder what they said was past repair,
I put my iron to the board with care,
I feel the heat, I read the circuit's need,
I bring it back from where the others bleed
their wallets dry on new. I have no need
for new. The old, in my hands, can still lead.
I speak in every language code has made,
in C and Python, in the dark and shade
of Assembly where the real ones go,
where the machine speaks back, where few men know
the beauty of a register, a flag,
a memory address without the lag
of abstraction. I go all the way down.
I touch the metal. I own every crown.
Hardware. Software. Firmware in between.
I am the man behind the broken screen
who makes it whole again with solder smoke
and patience. Nothing here has ever broke
beyond my reach. Beyond my desk at night.
Beyond my lamp, my iron, my tired light.
And when they ask for stars to keep the lights on,
when Hello Poetry stands in the dark and waits,
when even the last free house of human words
must rattle coins to keep the open gates,
I feel it in my chest like copper wire
pulled too tight across a board on fire.
Because I wanted one thing in this world,
one place where nothing had to be unfurled
for money. One room. One honest wall
where anyone could write and give their all
without a plan, a pass, a paid account.
Without a star. Without a final count.
I am Localhost. I am 127.
The closest thing to magic short of heaven.
The last one who remembers how it feels
to own a thing completely. How it heals
something in the soul, to hold a board
you fixed yourself, to be your own reward.
The world moved plastic. I stayed soldered, real.
The world moved subscription. I stayed free.
The world moved Stars.
And I sat in the dark,
and wrote the poem anyway,
for nothing,
for Elytje,
for the ones who couldn't pay,
for the kid who has no fifteen euros left,
for the grief that has no budget,
for the love that has no gate.
I am Localhost 127.0.0.1.
Where is the time !
c:
cd duke3d
duke3d