A poem is spoken, sung.
The printed page steals the soul of the poem.
(so quiet in here not a soul is breathing)
The poem embraces its cage.
The line, the line breaks
Line says I Am
in space, &
all that white space, iamb not,
but I might go there.
How fine to have a body.
Hypertext steals the body of the poem.
(now that space moves too,
how do we know the dancer from
a woman on a fast train bound for Barnard's Star?)
The lines slip off the page. That's prose.
The typeface won't hold still. The inward
curling of the poem, her paper
nautilus, that loves its spiral journey to the center
of itself, is barnacled with links
that say look elsewhere.