Poetry from The Literary Review
Chat
PAOLO MANALO
I've lost you to the dial tone's flatness.
Though the chat's regular and we're always logged on
you cut clean at the click of the button each time
each /query strays to the personal.
Without bitmapped image to save
on file, I dream you faceless, part human
part machine. You've got no name and no
gender, despite the details.
/stats lie
and you do it so well, you're anywhere
between sixteen and forty-two, while your height
adjusts each day of the week: Sunday you're five-eight,
inching at a daily rate, outgrowing
the longest of weekends. By Monday you're part
of a basketball team. Tuesday puts a few pounds on you,
Wednesday gives you breasts.
Thursday brings in the extra heads
so come Friday, you're one phreak of nature
with all hands and hardware to tap into
my diagnostics---it's your flattering way of breaching
the multitude of cyberspace.
In all those after hours, I take you to bed
and toss and turn all the aliases used.
You're all the lovers I've had in this
electronic lifetime. Ours is a world
of desire's endless equations, the digital
landscape dictating multi-
user personalities. How freely the lewd
handles are born under safety net
of monitor and firewall, but don't go
schizophrenic on me: if identity is just
a toggle switch, how easy to reduce
one's psyche to hexadecimal language---
to fall for numbers, letting lover grow expo-
nentially, pushing it forth to its abstract
levels, the feeling no closer to the truth.
