We send each other text messages at work.
Discuss what we’re having for lunch.
Ether-joined by 
unlimited messages and pixel screens.

Two minutes after saying goodbye on dates
our phones jangle, vibrate,
‘I had a lovely time tonight :)’.
The little xx means all the more from you.
You give me less than my mum
but it’s all the different.
I look and linger at them, there
at the end of your miniature letters.

Save the sweet ones in a folder
and read them when down.
‘These are the reasons I love you.’
‘Do you want to go to the cinema at four?’
‘I’ve never felt this before.’
I smile when I see your name appear.

The lump is a plastic pebble in our pocket
heavy with the weight of expectancy.
Linked to everything, 
almost sentient it throbs with the lives
of so many people a button press away:
Facebook, e-mails, Google

and you.

When people are gone:
vanished from our lives.
Ephemeral ghosts that exist
but don’t.
That breathe,
but don’t.
The wishing wells in which we shed our coins.

Our thumbs linger over ‘DELETE’
as though they’ll disappear from memory, too.
Punch. Gone. The love letters dead.
Think that’ll make us feel better.

When our hearts turn red again
we’ll wish we had the numbers still
to say hello, hi, 
how do you do.