here is modern grief

We leave our phones on all night. We pour out emotions on a Facebook group. We find comfort in mp3s, videos, digital photos. We set our Facebook photos, our statuses, our desktop backgrounds, in memory. We talk out our grief via IM, text message, email.

We leave our phones on all night in case someone needs to talk.

three more things

1. I found out when I went to quickly check my email before watching Ferris Bueller with some friends. The movie never happened. But part of me feels like if I hadn’t checked my email, she’d still be alive. Not rational at all, but… how I feel.

2. I go on Wikipedia binges sometimes, and I was partway through the list of serial killers. I’ve given up. Death just doesn’t seem interesting anymore.

3. I still have her cell phone number in my phone. Someday I’ll be ready to delete it, not today.

poem with found text

I’m going to call you, maybe.
I’m holding the telephone, but I keep looking down at it and wondering
‘What’s this for?’ then I answer myself
‘This is a telephone.
You were going to call . . .’
It has bite marks.
I chew on everything, but telephones are not for eating.
This I know.
. . . How?
Does ‘This is a telephone’ entail ‘You couldn’t eat it’?
Must I try to eat it, and fail, in the course of making sure that it’s a telephone?
And must I make sure that it’s a telephone?
The appeal of asking what it is
And confirming what it is
Is
It allows me put off the intended action.
(Calling you, that is.)
And then my intended action becomes putting off the intended action.
It’s even more insidious than such natural disasters as coffee-crazed cockroaches . . .
(This is a coffee-crazed cockroach, you couldn’t eat it.)
Coffee-crazed cockroaches crawling in from outdoors
To stare at the phone with me
Crawling into my closets, piled high with the promise of warm and wooly hats
Crawling through my closets to find the things I keep in back.
Hissing, are they hissing?
Yes, so they’re from Madagascar I assume.
Hissing watching me gnaw my fingers the phone a pen some chocolate
Waiting for me to dial the numbers, press send.
Listen to it ring, and wait.
Maybe I’m going to call you.

—

Text in green is not mine.