Yesterday I removed -1000 emails from my computer. In a sense I exterminated them like the vermin they are, infesting every aspect of my life. Where do deleted messages go? Are they like space debris destined to forever encircle our fragile earth? And what of those trillions of social media and app communiques as inane as ‘having a great time, wish you were here’?

In this age of instant texting what meaning do these messages carry? George Orwell, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Carl Sagan have all had their say, now it is Stephen Hawking and Nostradamus.

Humanoids with huge thumbs are programming humans – so yes, Your honour, I plead guilty to cybercide, systematically deleting 1000 people from my cyberspace … message by mess… age…

black umbrellas gone
just one drips rain …
into the open grave

Angelee Deodhar

A comma. I don’t pause very often. I pause too often. An ear. I gave up listening a long time ago. A cloud trail. Is there an end? A cloud-tail. Fast disappearing like my sense of self.

I remind myself that nothing is constant. Except maybe for this. A score of nows.

in a funk my muse and i

Shloka Shankar

An ant crawls across the face of a mirror. But the mirror is not a mirror, it’s the sky: an even monotone gray, flat and dull as my hair in the morning. And the ant is really an airplane, so distant I can make out neither the shape of its wings nor the roar of its engines. It moves in such a straight line that it can’t be an ant; ants are notorious stumblers. Sometimes after my morning smoke, I stumble into the bathroom and stare at my bloodshot eyes in the mirror, wondering why I’m still here.

confrontation
face-to-face with
another day

Elizabeth Alford

The squalid silence of the prison is shattered; the guards’ clicking tongues unfastened for their duty. Woken by rough hands, the disorientation of broken sleep takes a few seconds to pass. Partially clothed I’m led to the basement where a sloping floor and gutter drain blood and sinew. I think of the child whose joyous laugh I take to an unmarked grave. The executioner remains in the shadows as I stare at the timber-clad wall, cold concrete beneath bare feet. The log’s grain fascinates; its coarse texture apparent in the half-light. I hear the pistol cock. Nothing more.

empty chamber …
words drain away
into history

Tim Gardiner

i take the open top bus for the aquarium to bring snow to the seahorse in tank 56 who never believes me it would be gone by the time you arrived i explained again wiping my eyes and powdering my nose before emerging from the submarine I click the compact closed and fail to notice the glimpse of a seahorse determined to stowaway and see the snow from the top deck

the journalist
reporting from the frontline
wears no poppy

Sara Winteridge

You stay by the swings waiting for my covering fire. ‘Run’ I shout, before you thunder over, my oak rifle keeping the soldier on top of the slide occupied for a few seconds. Hiding by the tree in the corner of the park we ready ourselves for action. The Bolivian Army gathers at the park gates; outnumbering us, two against two hundred. ‘I suggest we go to the beach if we get out of this, Sundance’ I remark. ‘They have any ice creams down there, Butch?’ you answer before we charge from our shelter….Fuego! Fuego! Fuego!

freeze frame…
I wish we could hold the pose
a little longer

Tim Gardiner

Tonight I am bothered by the ticking clock. There must be a trick to counting sheep that I’ve not been told. To resist the nagging noises of a house worn down—its creaking 2-by-4s recite the reasons to keep standing, which may include a wrong one. I’m just the sort of madman to slip down the hall and rewrite iambs into allegories—hey old man poet, old Metronome clock, something has gone wrong tonight, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

outcast sleepwalker
climbing over barbed-wire dreams
into America

Bob Haynes