The Dwindle

Add it to the pile,

Black gadget obsession.

Replace what you already have,

Devoid of necessity.

Re-enforcing hurried lives,

So quick to share a passage compared.

With invisible glue you paste on facebook or twitter,

Vocal discussions reduced to discarded litter.

Text speech for your stories out loud,

Have stolen voice box, Braille or your best friends reading hours.

Cd’s and cassettes of audio book fame,

Abandoned in libraries of yesterday.

Tubes in a decade,

Full of tombstone clutching commuters.

Sitting in row upon row,

Waiting for what to do next from their computers.

A minute to buy, download then read,

Why such a hurry and craze for speed?

You’re eradicating the pilgrimage of the famed emporium isle,

Wandering through bookshops to pause and browse for a while.

Up to three and a half thousand books to be stored,

I was thinking when booking a flight last week,

How on earth will I get my bookcase on bored?

Reality check.

Not all five stars,

In your Amazonian skies.

Whispers of software ice ages,

And an electronic pinstriped abyss.

Your infatuation with convenience

Takes four months to fix.

No crinkles, rips or raindrop foot prints,

Only perfection without grain or pulp.

No longer will typos or double chapters,

Create priceless one offs for the collectors vault.

I tried to fold over a corner,

But neoprene snapped like my knuckles stuck in a queue.

Instead a pixelated angle of an impostor,

An ironically clever dog-eared fool.

The involvement of accidental bath water,

Has now come to an end.

Will you snuggle into the radiator,

To be read once again?

Fantastic memories of autographs,

And childhood waiting,

Hugging my indelible census of signatures so close,

To glimpse the fame in ink I was anticipating.

And what happens now,

Are we reduced to a cd pen signature per screen?

At a tonne a piece nail them to your wall,

Next to the crucified article staring from your pin board.

I caress lines of script with my finger,

Smile at doodles and frown at crossword scrawl.

No fiddly buttons,

Just me and my humble pencil.

The breeze turns my page,

Avoiding the unsquare digit dance you must fight.

With your jumped up flash drive’s E-ink,

Emulating the true original,

But will yours survive the same luminescent centuries in time.