Having a separate site for the purpose, I no longer bore you, dear readers, by posting poems, other than the home made variety here, but I will indulge myself and make an exception of this one. If anyone finds it O.T.T., offensive, exaggerated, unrealistic, even indecent, you're welcome to complain. Welcome to look away now, too, of course.
Angelica and Bob On Line
by David Hart
Angelica has crept out of bed and left early before getting on line.
She has missed the clip-art of a heart in the e-mail from Bob.
When Bob wakes with her gone it is from a dream of a woman
smashing through barbed wire towards the blue horizon.
Angelica in town swerves off into Uranus Precinct
and sees herself on video in the window of Dixon's.
Back at the home screen Bob frets and cries, God only knows!,
and for a moment this seems to be the breakthrough
he's been mousing his way through the fine folds of fields for.
The Evening Echo's early edition is devoting half its front page
to a young woman covering her face caught on camera leaving
the Clearwater Centre but it isn't her. But this is her,
a photo from that happy summer scanned in on Bob's screen.
Enlarging it with zoom control he examines for intent
the edge of her smile. Elongating it a fraction
everything soon becomes clear. The screen doesn't lie
and he can read her lips. Her eyes, too, were somewhere else.
In her attic suite in the Delphi B & B seventy miles away
a TV news report tells Angelica the flood in the graveyard
where her mother is buried is carrying off bodies.
Back at the home screen Bob clicks open some curtains
and a woman appears with open lips, while on Angelica's screen
there's a chape offering bliss and she move through it
into an aureole of love dust. Bob click's off the woman's clothes
one by one and kisses in excelsis her screen body: Oh, Angelica!
Bob and the screen image groan in harmony towards ecstasy.
Angelica in her room, sipping Cola from the machine,
types BOB in bold caps and says in a whisper, Bob, you bastard!,
then sends out an e-mail to anyone who will listen
asking for pictures of chocolate. On the home screen Bob's search
continues with new vigour into the night's net
punctuated by news from Australia about the cricket.
Nothing surprises me about what is going on out there in private places and/or online. I love the picture on your header. I have just watched "Cranford" with Judi Dench and the drawnings used in the menu page of those DVDs look just like your postcard and your header. Love it.
ReplyDeleteQMM
All paths lead back home so be careful who you virtual with!! :)
ReplyDeleteOh Friko without knowing it I have posted something about internet behaviour too!
ReplyDeleteFriko - I know I'm not supposed to but I couldn't help but chortle at this!! You don't half hit the nail on the head!! I love all your poetry and this one's no exception!
ReplyDeleteA thought provoking post, Friko. The internet is, at once, a technological marvel and a fast evolving landscape, where everything seems to be possible. Inevitably, there are negative aspects but, almost every new medium gets exploited by a minority.
ReplyDeleteAs an Information Scientist, I tend to push the benefits of online activity (not to the exclusion of everything else) and blogging is a prime example of the internet at its best.
Goodness gracious, lady, you are the cyber Mistress
ReplyDeleteof four, count them (4) blogs? One wonders how
you find the time to drop by our sites and deposit
your lovely comments.
Blogging has certainly opened my personal horizons,
including that latest craze, Facebook; the fastest
growing site in the world they say. One pal calls it
"email on steroids". We can be grateful that when
you write something, poetics or prose, we can read
it here. As you know by visiting my site, kind of
patterned in a sophomoric way on Jerome Rothenberg's
site POEMS & POETICS, I post my own poetry and
everyone else I admire all in one place; but the rub
is there is a ton too much out there that interests me,
and at last count, in three years I have posted over
6,600 things on the site.
Some of your wonderful followers have been dropping
by lately, and I love that when it happens.
I need to come back and read this more thoroughly...
ReplyDeleteFriko my dear, you have me hunting for a very old short story I wrote years and years ago on the edge of the internet about such a scene, I must dig deeper.
ReplyDeleteXO
WWW
A world of its own indeed. More than once seen, felt and lived, challenging indeed, as many times lifes will get way too deep into it, searching later for the "exit" sign. Please have a good Thursday.
ReplyDeleteLove ... love is strange, as Mickey and Sylvia sang so long ago.
ReplyDeleteA true modern poem
ReplyDeleteWarm Aloha from Honolulu
Comfort Spiral
On the plane on Monday I overheard the woman in front of me lecturing her daughter on her online 'friends', saying "It's probably a 30 year old man" with respect to the latest friend. I'd have to agree with the mum.
ReplyDeleteIt's a bleak image. The internet has brought people together in very meaningful ways but I will never lose the uneasy feeling that we are all headed away from the real and into a sterile vacuum of imagined, artificial experience.
ReplyDeleteWe are all here, we 'know' each other, we 'talk', we communicate.
ReplyDeleteYet we neer touch, feel, see each other and we're the harmless ones.
I am beginning to think that even blogging on the internet is blunting my feel for real life, warm, pulsing, messy, funny, dirty, difficult real life.
Yet I am hooked.
Glenn Buttkus - Nooooo, I do NOT run four blogs. I 'run' two and occasionally contribute to another two or three, or is it four blogs.
I am the Fridge Soup administrator but there is a whole gang writing.