after Wallace Stevens
1. Lights up like a child’s eye
on a fairground ride
on a hot, hot day.
2. Small letters balloon
hundreds of miles up to the satellite
splashing words down
into nano spaces.
3. Cupped in one hand,
sheltered by the other,
cold in the rain
4. The man without wires,
deafens his ears
looks vacant.
5. We believe we are spiders
making pearl-draped webs
of meaning.
6. Aeroplane mode: as if
we can open windows
swipe the sky.
7. Remember the squat green phone
(so trendy in the living room),
after six o’clock
you held the handset, finger
round and round?
8. Did you rush to get the key
in the door when you heard the bell,
as exciting as
the clack of the letter box each morning?
9. Who is the thirty-year old
running in the snow
ears open, eyes open?
10. Children pick
at the cobalt, shouldering
guns, so that the elements
glow in a dark continent.
11. Battery failing,
its core broken,
a mortal carcass.
12. When you get to the end of
your life will they give you the time
back you spent with the screen?
13. Your tongue stored on the cloud?
Your hands a stylus on skin?
Your breath virtual reality?
Moira arrived in Leeds via Liverpool, Warrington, Hong Kong, Cheshire, York and Huddersfield. Prior to poetry taking hold she worked as a bottle-packer, graph sorter-outer, medical secretary and lecturer, accompanied by a few fun things: melodeon playing, knitting and a son.
