Angelica & Bob On Line

Painting by Pablo Picasso

Angelica and Bob On Line

by David Hart


Angelica has crept out of bed and left early before
getting on line. She has missed the clip-art of a heart
in the e-mail from Bob. When Bob wakes with her gone
it is from a dream of a woman smashing through barbed
wire towards the blue horizon.

Angelica in town swerves off into Uranus Precinct
and sees herself on video in the window of Dixon's.
Back at the home screen Bob frets and cries,
God only knows!,
and for a moment this seems to be the breakthrough
he's been mousing his way through
the fine folds of fields for.

The Evening Echo's early edition is devoting half
its front page to a young woman covering her face
caught on camera leaving the Clearwater Centre
but it isn't her. But this is her,
a photo from that happy summer scanned
in on Bob's screen. Enlarging it with zoom control
he examines for intent the edge of her smile.
Elongating it a fraction everything soon becomes clear.
The screen doesn't lie and he can read her lips.
Her eyes, too, were somewhere else.

In her attic suite in the Delphi B & B seventy miles away
a TV news report tells Angelica the flood in the graveyard
where her mother is buried is carrying off bodies.

Back at the home screen Bob clicks open some curtains
and a woman appears with open lips, while on
Angelica's screen there's a chap offering bliss and she
moves through it into an aureole of love dust. Bob click's
off the woman's clothes one by one and kisses in excelsis
her screen body: Oh, Angelica! Bob and the screen image
groan in harmony towards ecstasy.

Angelica in her room, sipping Cola from the machine,
types BOB in bold caps and says in a whisper,
Bob, you bastard!,
then sends out an e-mail to anyone who will listen
asking for pictures of chocolate.
On the home screen Bob's search
continues with new vigour into the night's net
punctuated by news from Australia
about the cricket.

Posted over on Friko's Musings