Suppose it were Friday cl: Longhand revisited

   I welcome the gathering news
   of social media's incompatib-
   ility with society. A letter
   in a familiar hand was never
   out of synch with communica-
   tion, yet today I doubt that
   anyone under 50 can identify
   the handwriting of anyone he
   knows. Everyone known to us,
   whose hand we'd know, seems
   not to be with us, anymore.

   Say, who is touched anymore.
   For whose message would one
   drop everything, to give it
   pride of reception's place,
   to credit its concentration,
   in a caesura of acceptance?

   That feature of one's pace
   is revealed as the place of
   the capacity for friendship.
   Longhand, postage, transit.
   Where's their obsolescence?

   And what burdens our habits
   have placed, one would rath-
   er not assess - on poetry,
   literally to furnish those
   sentiments, scalded or scrap-
   ped altogether from us - not
   to mention, on policy, those
   evolutions of reflection, un-
   known beneath an OLED screen.

   Worse, naturally, is the de-
   fault to hired practitioners
   by atrophy of one's own hand.
   Worse, naturally, is the in-
   experience of time, itself,
   in spews of prestidigitation,
   compared with crossing a T.
   Worse, naturally, is the e-
   rasure of life's tangibility.

   In every way, the letter is
   closer to the being, the foil
   of alienation, of absences.
   Shape a vowel, hear the image,
   draw a breath. Sounds normal
   enough, in memory.