Alien Music
I was looking for
your name on a wall
in cyberspace where
the living and the dead
hold conversations without
uttering a word.
I saw that you have another life
as an Arctic geobotanist and then became
a Methodist minister, that there are forty-five
people with your name in England, that you
are still wondering why certain words
are inside of other words and can’t get out.
You can be found on Facebook, Intelius, LinkedIn,
MySpace, and you are nowhere in sight.
If I want to listen to any of your songs
I can click on a link, if I want to see an article
about you I can key in magical words
and read that we are not in Oz anymore.
None of us have to worry about being heard
or seen. We can write blogs about blogs where
reputations are rated and scored from afar,
where oil and documents leak from a canned
political soup. A one-night stand without remorse.
We can keep our thousands of friends in touch
with thousands of other people who are foremost
in their fields. I can see photographs
you post of us in our youths. I can indulge in
reveries of private nostalgia and pretend
you are in this room with me having a beer
in 1979.
Almost every afternoon storm clouds
shroud the mountains, an occasional
cool breeze rushes down the treed slopes
and I am wondering what happened to the beautiful
adobe house I painted two years ago.
I was looking for your name
on a wall and that, too,
is no longer here.
RS 2010