Poets,
Your lines are lovely,
And,
Your poem is evolving.
Because,
This is not my poem at all,
It's,
A product of your work,
Therefore,
It's yours.
The,
Second stanza has begun,
And,
We only need 283 poets more.

What an email,
Can reveal!
Embedded within the message,
What simple words unravel;
From where, and whom, they have traveled!
How much one can extrapolate
From mere more than chatter,
It would be astounding if not frightening
That you can tap out so much
From just dry lightning.

I can’t get your words out of my head
Syllable by syllable I’ve reread
Them a dozen times,
And now I contemplate why
And how I never knew
You felt how I do.

Just like the summer afternoon in December
You are both a wish and a memory

Layers and layers of cloth to shield
But can't keep the heart warmly

The words, music and pictures
All but I have remained yours truly

Like the signature at the end of a long email
This just is overlooked me, sincerely

Every time I answer I give away a little more of myself
The list of things I need to be grows every day
Another gap to plug with lines.

It’s hard to take sometimes.

I have begun to suspect that the old adage
“It's not you, it's me,” is not really about broken love but about ******* job applications.
You breathe a say of relief, I can hear it, “thank god not another lonely-hearts column”
Only a poem, insipid and sighing.

But I’m fresh onto the stage treading the boards for the very first time.
Swollen by years of septic success
Swimming in a pool on the Strand I was a happy middleweight
In this ocean, I am a particle of micro-plastic, unwanted but bobbing along nonetheless.

Another email, better than no email at all, regretting, informing and wishing me the best.
I draw myself together pulling at the loose strings at my seams, greeting, informing and thanking them for consideration, again.
This time though, the holes seem stretched, the string frayed
I’m a little worried that it will give, tired of straining it will collapse under the weight of my doused desire.

But there’s not much to be done.
So, I fill myself up with some watered-down ire, three coffees, a nibble of cake and a croc of horseshit with which to sell my fire.

Eli S.                                  10/3/17
To: Eli S.

NO SUBJECT

Are you here yet?

Sincerely, Eli S.

The subject of this email is as usual... subjective! Not sure there is actually a subject involved? I mean if I just ramble on about any old thing that crosses my mind, how would that be described as a subject. I submit that the "subject" line of all emails should be moved to the end of an email! That way we would have a better grasp of what the subject of the email truly is.

Better yet it should automatically prompt you to go to the subject line when you click "send" to fill in at that time. Maybe the email program should even give samples of possible subject lines based on google's interpretation of what you have typed in the body of the email. Better yet that program should just run automatically and impose a subject line based on the information in the message body after it is run through several psychiatric data bases and analyzed and a consensus has been reached...

Hmmm... Now I'm thinking that there should be a mind to keyboard interface so we can do away with all this time-consuming typing! And while we're at it why not add a chip in our brains that thinks for us and sends the data it receives directly to the keyboard interface... I mean think of all the time we would save not having to think any more!

Why stop there? We can also add emotion chips so that when we are letting our thinking chip talk for us we can also have the emotions that our emotion chip thinks we should be feeling automatically inserted into the email with the capability of it being felt by the emotion chip in the person whose thinking and keyboard interface chips are perusing the email written by our thinking and keyboard interface chips.

Ooooh now I'm really thinking... why not install mini SD drives in our brains so we can change the way we feel by simply inserting a new SD card? That way if we happen to read one of the emails thought out by our thinking chip, written by our keyboard interface chip, analyzed and consented to by the psychiatric data bases and given a subject and we decide that we want to change the way it is perceived by the thinking chip of the recipient we can simply insert a different emotion SD card into our SD drive and have those new emotions embedded directly into the email!

***! This is genius! Imagine the time we could save! I could just go on and on with this! The applications are limitless. Why hasn't someone thought of this before? Oh wait, what am I thinking... this is old news. This is called brainwashing and the government and every major company in the world has been doing it since the dawn of capitalism!

I'm going to stop now because I am no longer sure if the words I write are my own, or if they are just a bunch of noise created by the humm of all the post hypnotic suggestive clutter in my brain from years and years of commercial TV and slick politician abuse.

That's all I have time for this morning. I apologize in retrospect for the emotional agony I have put your brain through while reading this inane banter...

decline the call,
delete the e-mail,
ignore the speech,
ignore the message,
focus
focus on yourself and yourself only

Hey.
Um.
I know this is a bit soon.
I process thoughts quite rapidly. A fatal flaw if you ask me.
I think I might take up your offer to chat.
Uh.
It’s complicated.
But, something made me realise it might be a good idea. Even though my first instinct is that it isn’t.
I may or may not explain later.
So uh, can we. Talk that is.
Whenever is cool.
I just…yeah.
I’ll stop rambling and actually send this.
Yeah…