Did you know that Facebook posers
Who jump in the air, all limbs flung to the open,
Are almost caught doing, a flying
Pas de chat in ballet, the step of the cat.
How we like to be, like everyone else,
Jumping for the mobile phone,
To catch you, an albatross-like wingspan,
Diving back to ground earth.
What you will do for a camera phone;
Learning that space, is a brief interlude,
When you become, the acrobatic kite, that you’re not,
With no string to hold you in place, making you fall.
How I have no pogo stick or trampoline,
Beneath me, only my springing feet.
Still I jump as high as my feet allow me,
Only to hear the feet thud back seconds later.
My wife, operating the phone camera,
Says jump higher, I try, but I fail.
Then, I remember that man Javier Sotomayer, the Cuban,
Who was a graceful high jumper. How perfect
He would have been on his facebook page,
Height, poise, grace and flexibility,
Unlike me, who now jumps to the inviting air,
Knowing I went the furthest I’m able to,
Where my bipedal feet took me, not on
The X axis but the Y, while being eternalized in 2-D.
The sweet music, of a click of a phone camera,
Knees bent, arms extended, like an idiomatic
Butterfly, pressed, inside a page,
Of chronicled history. How one image,
Of a man leaping in mid air, is a contagion,
Spreading through a connective medium,
Which too, will be elected to power,
By the democratic vote of,
A facebook “like”.
Kite Dreams 