By: Thomas O’Connell

Virtual Weather

All my data
Has been stored
In a thunder cloud
Someday soon, it will start to rain

As a downpour
Releasing
Lapsed friend suggestions
Recently deleted emails

All my bygone
Photographs
Eventually
Gathering in curbside puddles
Splashed onto the shoes of someone waiting for a bus

###

Downloading the Age of Enlightenment App

Poor old Voltaire
Would be lost
If he had to set
A new ringtone on his iPhone

And Ben Franklin
(Bawdy chap)
Completely flummoxed
Loading his profile on Tinder

Aren’t we lucky
That we know
What they didn’t know
And that we can Google the rest
Technology is the opiate of the masses

###

Graffiti Obituaries

It’s the poem
Unwritten
That troubles my sleep
One that’s really about something

Like the passing
Of a friend
Or a co-worker
That I am simply unable

To put into
This structure
For some emotions
Don’t rest neatly in boxes, some
Need to be written with spray paint on a busy street

###

A librarian living by the banks of the Connecticut River in Springfield, Massachusetts, Thomas O’Connell’s poetry and short fiction has appeared in Jellyfish Review, Blink-ink, Live Nude Poems, Hobart, and The Los Angeles Review, as well as other print and online journals.