In praise of spider webs in the wind

I was without my phone for 11 days and I missed it. It’s nice to talk to my friends and loved ones, to try to take photos of beautiful things and always fail to really capture them, to listen to music, to look up that one actor from that one movie from forever ago. This poem is about what I didn’t miss about the phone.

begin with an image of war

then of something seductive

a dripping body or a burger

then another image of war

a missile like some sliver of oblivion

cutting through air and concrete with the same ease

a missile like destruction distilled into a spearhead point

and loosed upon a city a school a hospital a home

and then a bad joke

and then somebody doing something dumb

somebody falling while walking up their driveway

then a dog doing something a human usually does

then someone lying

then a bunch of people believing that lie

then someone beautiful

more beautiful than you’ll ever see in your real life

impossibly beautiful

someone who you’d watch do almost anything

then an advertisement for a movie

which combines all of this

explosions sex beauty

laughter and lies

perfection distilled

into two and a half hours

of quips and symmetry

then another image of war

than more seduction

enough of this to fill a few billion lives

but in the backyard

there are bits of spider web

loosed from branches

catching the light

looking like the golden filaments of the universe

gleaming

Alexander

This week on beyond the paywall: a discussion of sitting still, and a prompt to find your own filaments of the universe.