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Words are written now

Or, unwritten,

Left waiting in the recesses 

Of unordered thought.

Poets, a dying breed,

Now meet in the interstices of cyberspace,

Precious and defensive

Technical as the electric world 

In which each poem is scrawled.

The words of which we spoke

Are no longer in themselves

Spoken words.

No voices sound out their metre or rhyme

Or even turn their rhythm

Into the touch of hands

Or the meeting of eyes.

Silent whispers,

Lips mouthing sense extracted,

Sense without echo,

Meaning without presence,

Soul stripped of its shape

To come raw and perfect

But insubstantial

Across our imperfectly connected universe.

© BH 2002

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More about writing. Suited to the cyber age. Yes, we do it, here in them interstices: clumsy oafs, for the most part, sitting fat-arsed at our computers. 

As a boy, I believed the future would be inhabited by humans with wasted legs or none. We'd be stunted dwarfs after years behind the wheels of our jalopies. It may yet come to pass. 

Now I see agility of thought is going, into tweets and sound bites, degenerated into facile rants. We are terminals, on the receiving end, passive recipients, bloated consumers of pap.

There's a rant, now. See what I mean?

I dug this poem out because of something Karine Polwart posted. About message taking over from conversation. KP, if you read this, you've made me rant in cyberspace. I'm a hypocrite.