He could tell she was breaking up
on the telephone line:
his terms
of service were not good
enough
and she always cut out on him
when she wasn’t the one talking.
He wished she paid
attention to him like he did to her,
but she didn’t seem to think
downloads
were as good as
uploads.
He walked around the field,
trying to get a better signal
but the distance,
(or the indifference)
was too great.
It was a clear night sky
but everything between them was
unclear, static-eaten; a bad
connection.
He had cut a
crop circle
in that field with his
frantic pacing
and was about to leave
when he saw a strange light overhead.
He was never very good at
picking up ladies,
but this girl picked him up so easily
that he felt like he was
walking on air,
head among the clouds
as she shone the limelight on him,
beaming him up to her flying saucer
as he stood stock-still,
frozen as if with stage fright.
She somehow elevated him
as she looked down upon him
and invited him into her
inner sanctum.
Once there, she picked his brain with
telepathy
and something similar to a
laser scalpel.
He opened his mind to her like a
canned ham,
and though his ex-girlfriend
thought it as unwanted as
Spam, she thought it
caviar.
She cared about what he thought
as she lit up his neurons with
so many deep questions and
so many sharp surgical instruments.
She took great care, too, with his
heart,
tenderly caressing it,
stroking it,
lovingly sealing it away
in a special, protective jar
during the dissection.
And even though she had
large black eyes
and long suction-cup fingers,
and legs that bent the wrong way,
she seemed genuinely interested in
everything about him,
her life now dedicated to him
like an extraterrestrial
Jane Goodall
so attuned to her Great Apes
that nothing else in the world mattered to her
as she brought him home
to meet her parents;
as she bragged about her
Grad school thesis experiment
on hominid males.
Looking out from his jar,
his disembodied brain
considered itself
very lucky
to have such a wonderful, immediate,
and uninterrupted
connection.
He mattered in her life.
Tangleroot And Tressknot 