Delete Forever

Inspired by clearing out emails I wonder how many relationships never make it beyond the internet.

Our time together recorded in texts, emails.

The early days, emoticons grinned yellow,

Pink hearts pulsed at me,

Kisses marched across my screen X X X.

We had no real connection, just played our roles in a fantasy game.

Now, smooth rounded plastic nestles, caressed in my palm,

A finger hovers, touches, decides.

One technological terminating click,

Our online relationship,

Deleted forever.

Reviews

[C J Heyworth]

I enjoy reading the "take" of others on the phenomenon of social media and your poem does this well.
I would not have believed when I began "dabbling" in 1997 when our son gave us an iMac for Christmas that I would gain such joy from being able to "reach" so many people of fellow-feeling all over the globe.
This has been especially so since I joined Facebook in November 2008 at the invitation of a Canadian cyber-friend to celebrate the USA finally getting round to electing a non-WASP President.
I find the daily chit-chat mainly on the Arts useful as my mobility has become more limited -
http://www.facebook.com/cjheyworth
and have invested in my specifically WRITING page at
http://www.facebook.com/christo81
and Facebook tells me I now have over 2,000 Fb Friends, though not that many keep in regular touch.
On your focus on "end of cyber-relationship" it has happened only twice, one a guy who posted "joke" photos of the Obamas as gorillas, and one by a writer here in the NW who had become an impossibly bossy presence in whose eyes I could do nothing ever "right". She de-friended me with a click when I told her so. Her loss.
Cyber-relationships have become much closer with perhaps 40 or so "regulars" for whose wit, interest and concern I am grateful, having built mutual liking and respect over quite a period, mostly through struggling with trying to gain writing perfection - great fun.

[Jacky Tustain]

Thanks for your review. Over the years I have connected with many and then occasionally filtered out some, for no other reason than ease of management and possible dwindling of communication. The way we interact with the world through social media fascinates me. How it is changing our younger generations and the impact is yet to be seen. Hopefully there will be good as well as the negative stuff people talk about.