Poem by Steve Glines

"Word on Technology" by Cindy Williams



Hands on the home keys in meditation

Hands on the home keys in meditation. I await a visitation by the muse. This is an old familiar position and I am comfortable. I look at the back of my hands as I have for decades and note how the wrinkles of age have grown like little gullies upon an ancient hill. I look upon the hands of an old man, as unrecognizable as the face I shave in the morning. I smile;
she is here. She will always come.

I stare somewhere beyond the keyboard. Hands in soft focus, madly they work and fly scat images, also in soft focus, appear at the upper edge of my vision. I am typing, transcribing words from an ethereal voice, words that will reveal themselves when I look up and dismiss myself from this spell.

For now, I enjoy the soothing but undistinguishable voice that drives my hands across the keyboard. Soft and sweet like the caressing touch of a first love; I am enthralled, that this voice and these hands will create … such beauty. I wish for an eternity but creation like pro-creation has an end and I must eventually look up and into the eyes, the face of God.

I catch but a fleeting glimpse of a quickly departing muse, off, no doubt, to pluck the strings or press the keys of another desperate lover. I sit motionless, staring at the work before me in awe. I am satisfied, exhilarated, exhausted. This beauty is not of my doing ‘though I shall take credit for it. It shall have my name just as the child of another labor does.

I look down at my trembling hands, the wrinkled hands of an old man, older for the experience, older for the toll life takes of those driven to the muse. She is gone now but she will return, she will return. Faith is the promise we make to ourselves to be at her beck and call. When she returns these hands will be ready. Hands on the home keys in meditation.