Antisocial Media
By Jennifer Militello
It’s easier to computer than to crash. It’s easier
to computer than to hold a hand or knit
a winter together from headlights on the highway.
It’s easier to computer and be a hybrid and
cross from bowels and eardrums into hours
lit and roaring by like freight. The chapters
there can tell you an octopus has three hearts,
that snails breathe through their feet. It is easier
to have no arms or breath, to position through
colors and jumps shoreless as steam. No
surfaces. No verbs to be. No mussels
or bellows or congestion or caffeine.
No lens to focus, no Rome to burn. Who can
do when the roots are so untidy and
the branches rack like antlers against other
branches. It’s easier to computer than
to guess at a savior. Than to whisper slips
of information to the flesh. Let language construct
mere dewdrops of light. Let the circuitry
gauge the need and make it clean and make it
so heady it is erected, a remedy, in its ease.
There is no destination. No grave in place of a person
loved in the past, no identity classified, factual, no glass
to break open in the fisted hand, no cracked windshield,
no hurricane. Or there is, but it is closed inside its box
smaller than the box for roses, dead and moldered
by the time they reach the door, delivered only once.
