Lonely Planet

I dreamt we walked across an ashen beach;
the brittle moonlight gleamed through ragged mist.
You slipped ahead, not quite beyond my reach,
glanced back, and touched my cheek. We never kissed.
Then waking in a warm, half half-empty bed,
to children's laughter echoing outdoors,
my head echoed with words we left unsaid:
approaching footsteps - they cannot be yours.
Inhabiting instead, a lonely planet,
for us, no thrill of softly yielding flesh,
the sultry aftermath, when souls enmesh.
In cyberspace, remote yet intimate,
as modems trill: a satellite above,
defies the gravity of hidden love.

A few weeks on with the help of new found cyber-pals, maybe I was beginning to better understand some of the challenges of sonnet writing . Technically the metre's not bad. it turns quite nicely and the final couplet packs a bit of a punch. True, the rhyme scheme in the sestet is unconventional and the inversions in lines 8 & 9 border on the archaic. This is hardly the point however, the thing is mawkish; even at the time I was not at all comfortable with my state of mind and I chose to post this just before I headed off for an extended trip to Corsica, I'm not sure now how that was supposed to help.

Managing life on-line has become so mainstream these days that it's difficult to imagine, just twelve years ago, how odd it felt to end up in remote, web-based relationships - though I suppose 'You've got Mail' from 1998 kind of touched on it. These days the phenomena has  spawned a whole new academic discipline. Amber Case describes herself as a Cyborg Anthropologist, and explains that we all have two adolescences now, both equally awkward, a real world adolescence and a virtual one. The realisation, a decade on, that in fact what felt at the time like some kind of out of the blue, alien emotional crisis, was in fact just the machinations of a social trend - does that help, or just render the whole experience crushingly mundane?  Like real adolescence, cyber-adolescence seems cringe-worthy  afterwards, particularly so poetry produced under its dubious spell.