Microsoft

Shuttered tight in our glass cells
we were the drones of the beehive
hunters gatherers with Microsoft calendars.

We were warriors with smashed avocados.
We fought our battles with whispers down corridors
even the air we breathed was not ours.

We were never at home but merely ‘out of office’.
We did not notice. Our life was a library –
a catalogue of scrolled imagery.

Now we hold meetings with our own family.
We are forced to lip read their words
as if watching a poorly dubbed movie.

The office world is following us
with its wagging finger and its
dull, half-baked technology.

It never worked properly.
Of course, it is dressed casually.
What next? That’s what worries me.

Synchronized bank holidays?
Perhaps, at the top of the stairs
a Pret a Manger or a new Costa Coffee.

The great silence

That year spring came unnoticed.
It whispered to us from outside
in the curious languages of birds
that were normally unheard.

We had moved inside. The skies had emptied
erased of humans and their quaint terrors
as the virus lumbered across the world
in a pestilence of numbers and words.

Inquisitive observers, self-exiled
we watched the planet that we had poisoned
pressed back by the great silence.

We were prisoners locked in glass houses

trapped by an epidemic of loneliness

reading a message that nature did not need us.