In what ways do you communicate online?

Duras, Marguerite. The Lover. Or maybe The Ravishing of Lol Stein. The ones where she lets silence do the work. Where the gaps between words matter as much as the words themselves. 1964 / 1984 / time collapses when the writing is that good. Wood, Matthew. Personal correspondence. Or maybe it was a three-day intensive on plant energetics. Or maybe I’m mixing up which teacher said what. The plants remain consistent even when memory falters.
My own hands, age 8-present. Primary source. Unreliable narrator. Still writing.

In What Way Do You Communicate Online?

I post poetry / whether anyone reads it
or not / I have no idea / don't track
the metrics / never learned how / been
writing since I was eight / before
I knew what outcomes were / before
I understood you were supposed to want
something from it

I also read other people's poetry / online
mostly / but here's the thing: if you post
a poem with three paragraphs explaining
what you meant / what the moon symbolizes /
why you wrote it / I'm gone / it's like
trying to find a recipe and someone's
writing about their grandmother's farm
and the goats they milked / just give me
the poem / the poem should tell me
everything / if it doesn't / that's the poem's
problem / not mine

Publication happens sometimes / doesn't
happen other times / I'm not attached /
writing isn't a career strategy / it's just
what my hands do / what they've always done

Introverted / neurodivergent / which means
texting over calls / always / asynchronous
over real-time / I need the buffer / the pause
between thought and response / the ability
to revise before sending / or not send at all

Online I share poems the way some people
share weather updates / here's what I saw /
here's what I made of it / here's language
doing what language does when you let it
fracture / accumulate / refuse resolution

No agenda / no platform-building / no
five-year plan / just decades of syntax
trying to hold what can't be held / grief
beauty / the way velvet rots / the way
shelf fungus teaches transformation

Been doing this since before the internet
existed / will keep doing it after / algorithms
be damned / reader counts be damned /
the work outlasts the infrastructure