convenience accounts for only half our remoteness since the wires vanished stop I said rupture and blinked stop You said you wanted lightning not meaning stop If one absence indicates another I am not looking but listening stop For what is missing in a confusion of cities and decades where voices are always cheerful or always quiet stop No one can tell anymore when we are pretending but defunct machines fascinate me and broken codes stop Tangled lines stop You asked weekly though I found it difficult to enclose my life for decoding stop At first everyone assumed the paper itself must travel stop Changed to pellets or rendered fluid stop How shocking then to read a friend in strange hand