Instead of foraging around making connections
with cables and wireless systems that
bluetooth and sync their way
into our pocket technologies
and portable screens

(tablets of which we self-prescribe
and regulate through overdose
and comatose keenings of stillness
and waking dreams)

why, instead
don’t we fool around
making connections
with others of like mind and brainwaves
instead of radiowaves and
the mastered minds of computer waves
and lift an arm and
really wave
beyond our windows to
real people
in real time
rather than peeping
like a holographic Tom through
tabs and browsing windows,
multi-tasking time in a state of mime
like it’s about to expire

(like the wireless wires will break)

and all that we’ll have is
all we can physically take
from this moment awake we call ‘life’
– a mistake.

What else is left now
in this vegetative
one man one woman state
where we live to close our eyes
and shut our minds and wait for
the modem-router to re-dial and
get our avatar back online and
our friends back into our
multi-dimensional realer-than-time
time?

Pseudonyms solving identity changes
emerge without birth
with designer non-faces, as
now that we no longer need imperfection
or meaning or privacy
or even perception
we alter ourselves to impress our connections
with whom we connect without really connecting
by hiding as one almost nearing detection
and tip-toeing straight past
concern or reflection

(invisible firewalls at our protection)

our own walls around us
with keys we can capslock,
screening ourselves from unfriended friends,
and playfully sated by charm and ‘pretends’
that will mean next to nothing
when fantasy ends.

Where ARE the connections we make
in this digital age
that we rarely turn off since
the internet craze has become a new God
that we dial to be saved
as we sacrifice friends we once made
face to face
with those we are longing to meet
as we race across networks
with hunger and haste and
with spambots and data and viruses made
to detect and infect
and reject, just for starters,
and that’s not to mention
the ads and the logins and
passwords that lock us
from somewhere far yonder
that doesn’t exist
as we grow ever fonder
of pics and of pixels and
texts of expression
– the reality of which
we could lose in a second.

I am like those SETI-scientists,
clinging on radiowaves;
noise-melodies from outer space,
questing after truth with huge telescopes
and scanning the visible light with satellites,
seeking desperately the limits of worlds apart,
searching for signs of intelligent life
in the desired-to-know universe.
Just to communicate with the extra-terrestrial;
to achieve certainty: there is someone out there,
someone, who is different, yet alike,
who is able to speak my thoughts
without knowing my language,
who still can easily translate my feelings
into the secret programcode of the universe.
An astral-traveler,
who can tame the waves of gravity,
someone, who is faster than the speed of light
and could eat the distance between us.
To be my interstellar compass;
my one and true guidance,
to help me explore this unfathomed life.
Someone, as David Bowie sang at once,
who is able to believe the strangest things,
who is able to love the alien.

It's happened on your last watch.
In a lonesome salvage yard,
she - who was raised by machines - like
an electric shadow on a hopeless, desolate street in Berlin,
was risen by
the taste of your swallowed tears as bitter as gall,
the music of your careless heartbeats singing
its own song of rust,
exhaling radiowaves for picture and thus
bring you into life again
by reshaping the man - from the sounds of wind chimes
and piano accords - who you were
more than half a life ago.

life's locomotion hastens my soul's erosion
and i long to sink to the ocean floor.
so i let the radiowaves carry me out the open door -
to the ocean's shore.

I see a sea shell, broken, and she's chosen or
stolen like raw golden ore
I know that she's worn; sea foam's torn
the claw from her own paw.
I had this notion to be a slave to my emotions; oxytocins *****.

but my affection ebbed in motion like a seagull drifting on the delicate cadences of the wind's waxing and waning devotion.
so no more