corey mesler
All Your Links are Broken
It’s how we talk online.
Before the internet
where were we?
What, at that time,
did disconnected mean?
Now, we reach out
a finger. And we touch,
just like that. It’s the kind
of satisfaction we had
been seeking, even
as we crawled from our
caves. It’s the idea
that other people
are out there, that other
people use words
like patulous and erotica
and creativity, just like us.
To almost mean
the same thing.
Now, the site I used to
settle on is down.
It’s how we talk online
and by it mean that
what was once so solid
is now virtually useless.
Still, I can email you.
I can say, talk to me, play
with me, use the words
we’ve learned down and
down the ages. Use the
words to get us through this,
the ones that cohere,
that sting, that turn around
like a lost friend.
It’s how we talk online
We say let’s exchange links.
Let’s stay awake all night.
We say soon I will send you
my new address on hotmail.
Trust me, I’m still here.
COREY MESLER
has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published four
novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002), We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006),
The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores (2010) and Following Richard Brautigan (2010), a
full length poetry collection, Some Identity Problems (2008), and a book of
short stories, Listen: 29 Short Conversations (2009). He has also published a
dozen chapbooks of both poetry and prose. He has been nominated for the Pushcart
Prize numerous times, and two of his poems have been chosen for Garrison
Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He also claims to have written, “You Light up my
Life.” With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest
(1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at
www.coreymesler.com.