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David Selzer is a writer of poetry, prose fiction, screenplays and stage plays. He embraces digital platforms to share his work of more than fifty years… READ MORE
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ETHEREAL
The Facebook algorithm tells me I have
memories to share with friends – and when I look
I see that one of them died four years ago.
She was always a meticulous person
but seems to have neglected to leave details
of what to do with her Facebook account.
Now LinkedIn is encouraging me
to congratulate a colleague – deceased
these nine years – on his work anniversary.
Social media is filling with dead souls
that pass across our screens like shooting stars.
Maybe these are deliberate memento
mori; if accidental, permitted
by heirs celebrating the departed’s
sense of the absurd – or a casualness
about our commonwealth, like space debris:
the flecks of paint off bits of satellites,
an astronaut’s toothbrush, a rocket
lost, junked in the heavens.
3 responses to “ETHEREAL”
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I like this poem. My mobile phone address book is full of the departed. I can’t bear to delete them; each removal would seem somehow like the betrayal of a friendship. A bit fanciful perhaps but I think we writers can allow ourselves a little of that.
I rummage through the principal bookcase, a huge wooden concertina of a thing, easy to pack yet surprisingly capacious. An indexer’s bookcase wherein I find Gogol between Frazer and Kenneth Grahame. ‘Dead Souls’ is thinner than I remember (years since I read it) but next to ‘The Golden Bough’ most works look unfed.
Those three extremely fanciful works are I suspect merely a microcosm of the library they are part of. Full also of old friends.
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Facebook allows you to save a relative’s page to a ‘Legacy’ account. Then it’s almost impossible to delete, I’ve found. I suppose FB counts all those souls in its billions of ‘users’ though it’s clear, or getting more clear, who is being used.
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That reminds me of Gogol’s DEAD SOULS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Souls
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