Moth Song

Nights I spent trying to understand
with moths on the wall. Wrestling for
best words, close-reading, in love
with an ellipsis that says a response
is coming. I only had to imagine
the garden where it was spoken,
narrate our voices, dub birdsong,
light it after a fetid summer evening,
air warm and flies like murder,
trying for strawberries, and our
attempts to fend them off,
as it ruins the taste to know what
they've touched, and things touch
in this world. It might have
been August. No tone or facial cue
by way of confirmation,
or dispute, so why ever not?
 
Let it happen. Let's let it happen.
Wing-beats I cupped for you.
I wonder what was heard. 

Waggle Dance

I was nervous, chatty, trying to impress you
with trivia I'd learned the day before
to make you think I wasn't boring.
I told you how honey bees communicate
through movement: the waggle dance
they do to tell the hive
there's food nearby, and where to find it.
It's not like how we talk. Our words are
digital, composed of smaller pieces, concatenations
of a finite alphabet of sounds. Their alphabets
are their bodies, or the motions they make
with them, continuous: the subtlest movement
carries meaning. And yet, for all this,

their conversations are a simple thing: just a short
relay of the necessary information. There's no
meandering, no small talk, no anxiety over
misinterpretation. No embarrassed stream of
nonsense that trails off into silence.
It serves a function. Then it stops.

After I'd finish talking, your expression
changed, almost imperceptibly.
I had no idea what that meant.

the-digital-age
 
You were talking softly- I couldn’t hear a word you were saying... so I turned up the volume on my computer but you looked at me funny... You stopped loving me in that moment and probably in a thousand other moments like that.
 
Like when you were touching my cheek and whispering the world into my ear as I checked my feed. When we thought we had found our rhythm... you kissing my inner thigh; me texting.
 
For every time you asked me if I was listening because my eyes were on a screen not you. For every time we wrote status updates not love letters - for every single thing I tagged you in because it was easier than thinking of something to actually say to you, sending you gifs not gifts, giving you ‘likes’ not love, thinking being noticed is better than being whole.
 
so yeah I made wifi connections but missed flight connections and missed holidays and birthdays and anniversaries and I missed everyday --> cause I laughed louder at a snapchat than your jokes I moaned harder watching shit porn online than making love to you I screamed louder breaking my phone than your heart well I guess I fucking loved harder some digital piece of shit than I did you
 
‘I’m online'
now I’m alone.