Tag Archives: cyber world

Touchy Subject, for dVerse Poets

40 Replies

Touchy Subject

My soul, once slippery as an seal,
that eased as easily as an eel
to heaven and back, a wave worn path,
like slippy-sliding in the bath,
has grown rough ridges that jerk me back
into the mosh pit with the pack.

We flail with elbows, boot tips, knees—
all of us caught within the squeeze
of what we hate and knock against,
beat fist and teeth and cock against.
It’s like a cageless, viral zoo,
this rough world we’ve evolved into.

The whole world’s in each other’s viewing,
killing, ripping, tearing, chewing.
We touch the keys to tear asunder,
ravage, rape, ransack and plunder.
These same hands that could stroke the keys,
pound and punish, grab and seize.

We Tweet or Snapchat, Facebook, Skype,
barely touching as we type.
We are so constantly in touch
that we do not consider much
that in our constant online dealing,
we should give more thought to feeling.

We cannot feel a handshake’s squeezing,
warm and tender, pressured, pleasing,
when we’re too far away to touch.
We cannot feel so very much.
We feel with organs meant for thinking,
and make connections without linking.

Those of us who predate the text
tend to fear what’s coming next.
A simple touch could end the world—
all of us pulverized and hurled
into a place where nothing lingers.
No tongue, no lips, no questing fingers.

https://dversepoets.com/2018/11/13/tuesday-poetics-touch-me/

In Absentia Conversations

5 Replies

When we first met online, Forgottenman, in Missouri, serenaded me, in Mexico, over Skype until I fell asleep every night. The illustration above is one from a night when I asked to see his hands strumming the guitar as I fell asleep. Sweet, huh? That ended after a year or so, but over the past seven years, we have had many midnight and post-midnight Skype conversations.  Want to eavesdrop?  Here are a few:

On Skype (After Midnight and 3 Margaritas)

She: maybe I need to take Frida (the Akita) to the snore doctor.
She: Perhaps she has sleep apnea. She sounds like a lion when she sleeps.
She: Have you ever heard her snore?
He: Yep.
She: Do you miss it?
He: Miss your zzzz’s
She: You miss my snores? Sweet.
She: I miss snoring for you.
He: That’s the first line of a poem.
She: I’ll write a poem starting with “I miss snoring for you,” if you will, too.
He.: I’ll try to remember to do so tomorrow.
She:

You Say You Miss My Snores

I miss snoring for you,
stepping on your shoe
when we don’t dance,
miss that glance
from your alternate self
you keep on a shelf
when you aren’t with me.
How can it be
that both of us choose
to leave our clues
in cyberspace
not face-to-face?
Alone together
with no tether,
our way
for today
perhaps forever
internetedly clever.

He: it just blows me away how you can come up with something like that, so achingly beautiful, in less than five minutes!
She: Ah. You inspire it.
He: I muse you whilst i amuse you
She: Ha. That is exactly it!
She: What you just said couldn’t have been said more succinctly or more briefly. It is the tweet
of poetry
She: sweet tweet of poetry—sweet bird of absurd

(After this, the conversation digressed.  No more shall be said.)

Update: “He” has written his version, as agreed. I give a link to it below the short additional conversation below

At Midnight after 4 Margaritas:

She: What is the most dreaded disease of hockey players?
He.: i give
She: Chicken Pucks!!!
He: (facepalm emoticon)
She: What is the most dreaded disease of Narcissists?
He.: I give
She: Me-sles.
She: The most dread disease of martyrs? (Promise, last one.)
He: ?
She: You-rinary tract infections

Note: These Skype conversations are from four years ago.The second one actually occurred the same night as the 3 Margarita conversation, so no, I’m not drinking Margaritas every night.  Also, I mix very weak Margaritas, so they are not totally to blame for the silliness above.  Around one or two in the morning, my mind usually gets on a jag and the best way to deal with it is just to hang up on me, which happened soon after this string of unfortunate jokes.  Corny, but I still get a kick out of them.  Yes, they are all original.  I wouldn’t blame them on anyone but my own past-midnight mind.  Judy

.See Forgottenman’s answer to my “You Say You Miss My Snores”  here.

 

The posts above are copied from blogs posted four years ago. The prompt today was conversation.

IMG_1316

Books

The fresh bookstore smell of them,
bending the pages to crack the spine,
notes scribbled in the margins,
underlines,
hearts with initials on the flyleaf,
something to loan or to wrap for a gift,
something propped up on the bathtub edge,
its paper sprinkled with drops-—
pages wrinkled into a Braille memory—
that rainstorm run through,
how he put it in his back pocket.

Poetry touched by fingers.
Single words met by lips.
Words pored over by candlelight or flashlight
in a sleeping bag or in a hut with no electricity.
Books pushed into backpacks
and under table legs for leveling.

Paper that soaked up
the oil from fingers
of the reader
consuming popcorn
or chocolate chip cookies
in lieu of the romance on the pages—
finger food served with brain food.
Passions wrapped in paper and ink—
the allure of a book and the tactile comfort.
The soul of a book you could touch, fold, bend.

Books are the gravestones of trees
but also the journals of our hearts.
Cities of words,
boards and bricks of letters,
insulated by hard covers or the curling skins
of paperbacks.
Something solid to transfer the dreams
of one person to another in a concrete telepathy
of fingers and eyes.
Books are the roads we build between us,
solid and substantial—
their paper the roadbed,
the words the center lines directing us.

What will fill the bookcases of a modern world?
Wikipedia replacing dictionaries,
Google already an invisible bank of Encyclopaedia Britannicas.
What will we use our boards and bricks for,
if not to hold up whole tenements of books?
How will we furnish our walls?
What will boys carry to school for girls?
What will we balance on heads
to practice walking with perfect posture?
What will we throw in the direction of the horrible pun?

Will there be graveyards for books, or cities built of them?
Quaint materials for easy chairs or headboards for beds?
Will we hollow them out for cigar boxes
or grind them up for packing material?
Where do books belong in the era of Kindle and Audible?
These dinosaurs that soon will not produce more eggs.
Perhaps they’ll grow as precious as antiques.
Perhaps the grandchildren of our grandchildren
will ponder how to open them. Will wonder at their quaintness,
collecting them like mustache cups or carnival glass,
wondering about the use of them—as unfathomable as hieroglyphics.
That last book closing its pages—one more obsolete mystery
fueling the curiosity of a bygone era that has vanished
into a wireless universe.

search search-1
Yes, you are right. These are chairs made out of books.

 

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Going Obsolete.” Of all the technologies that have gone extinct in your lifetime, which one do you miss the most?