Death on the Internet

Posted on May 2, 2004 in Poems The InterNet

This is inspired by my remembering an incident from Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast : A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea. As I was sitting, digesting a poetry reading and gazing over my books, the linkage occurred to me. Consider it a gift to all my online friends, on good terms and estranged, near and far, poets and politicos. Your existence is important to me. Don’t disappear like this.

Death on the Internet

is like a man falling

from a square-rigger’s masthead

during a voyage around the Horn.

The mistep

the flight

the splash

the blue Pacific

endless and unperturbed.