you feel it
when you clutch your wrist
before you cut

remember

it's your only one

digital availability
   around the clock
after a while
begins to feel like
permanent responsibility

your friends expect you
to be online all the time
    whether you like it or not
so they can share with you their daily trivia
of personal condition, discount shopping, their dog’s health,
the children’s good, their problems with their partners,
etcetera etcetera

I know it’s nice to hit a button
and hear the ringing of the other’s phone
the voice responding to your call

it’s fine when there are no alternatives

and yet

somehow the electronic chat
confirms more than redeems
presence of absence of the person

I feel like talking to an avatar
a disembodied voice
that has a virtual existence
yet whose life in the real world
still needs to be asserted
by meeting – and talking –
in a café
or simply on the street

creates our universe
our gods
makes armies clash
defines our world
    always again and new
names everything
   we then can talk about

lets politicians sound as if
    they were our saviors
lends voice to protests
    also well-phrased obedience
articulates all complicated laws
    and sometimes even makes them clear
makes us hate people
    or fall crazily in love with them

more difficult, it seems,
is to find words for our hearts and souls

    how to express your love
    appropriate to the occasion

    or to describe a painting by Degas,
    Rubens, Kokoschka, Michelangelo,
    the impact of a symphony
    or a performance on the drama stage
    
to catch the words for what we feel
is much more difficult
than to imagine those for what we see

it is the poets’ challenge to give shape
to all the hopes, loves, fears, and phantasies
in our lives

so we can make the power of the word
the power of the world