Remember when the phone company lost a big whack of text messages, then years later accidentally released them?
Zombie buzz on people’s phones from now dead friends and family: “Having a wonderful time in Hawaii!!! XOXOXO!!” from the day before they drowned
Or dropped from a heart attack. The lost messages going way back – Jesus texting Mary “I’ll be home after basketball, just stopping out for a drink with the boys.” Menelaus drunk-dialing
Helen of Troy “Come home, baby, I love you, I need you.” Lincoln to Mary Todd: ”This play blows.” God to Job: ”JK!!!” I got your text from October 1973
The month you died. We never found a note, just your clothes folded on the foot of the bed. "Dinner in the oven" I guess will have to do,
I wonder where it was you had gone that day, maybe grocery shopping at Safeway or to your lecture, there are no emoji
For despair, or abyss, or daylight sharded into cracks separating one more step forward from oblivion. Your tweets the last calls of distant birds on their long journey home.
Apologies dear reader if I spammed you this poem. Understood if you block my number, it’s an old message that found its way to me
And now to you. A story long in the tooth if we can say the Internet or time or memory have sharp teeth.
For Shay’s Word Garden
qbit 
No spam here, no-sir! Those messages are for real / like a Cohen’s hallelujah.
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Thank you Helen. As always.
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I love love love that line about the calls of distant birds. Yes.
I’m puzzled though. This starts out sort of jokey, with the famous names from antiquity leaving stale texts, but then this switches to what should be a very poignant section about losing someone, but isn’t as powerful as it should be because of the jokey start. Forgive me, but I think this is two pieces, peanut butter and pepper. Either one works if the theme is held, but the poem needs to decide what it wants to be.
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100%. I started in one place but, found myself in another but I ran out of time before I could do anything about it.
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Ah, that old devil, time.
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With his sharp teeth.
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Q, I take this to be so precious—the yearning for a message, or any scant note that gives is that (written) confirmation of love. Oft times it’s written on the heart.
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Beautifully said.
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I have my daughter’s phone, and I look through it and find things we wrote to one another. Perhaps the closest we can get to eternal is the internet never lets go of us. Beautiful poem.
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Thank you!
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Somebody famous said, ‘the past is always with us,” and here you show us that eternal truth, modernized, ‘uploaded’ and ‘updated’ and glaring in its mechanical inability to recognize its own irony. We live in a time of emotion surging and intellect ebbing, and the past is often as forgotten as a deleted text, until it isn’t. I especially like “..there are no emoji/For despair, or abyss, or daylight sharded into cracks…”
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Yes, and everything a rolling eternal “now” on our devices. So glad you liked that line.
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“We never found a note, just your clothes folded on the foot of the bed.”
Cuts to the core, the need of that, the loss of it. If only there were more lost notes, “texts” that made their way back to us at the edge of that abyss of despair and grief. But would we grieve any the less?
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I don’t think so. Grief and loss will take us in equal measure to our love. Thanks for the read.
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that sharp-toothed ringing in my ears, from the echoes of this pen ~
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This is stunning and stirring, q. The internet, time, and memory all have sharp teeth indeed.
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Thank you. Indeed.
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