Don’t Make Me
by Carol Casey
The venerable wood
of the coffee table beside me
is a handy place
to put my laptop
while I scream,
computer on mute
so nobody knows.
When my laptop
is snail slow
and my blood pressure
is rising
I can turn it off
and on again
and sometimes that works.
This doesn’t work
with the people
in my life,
so annoying,
like losing control
of my mouse
when there is no way
to go to system preferences
and reset.
You will not reset,
even though I tell you
I should have added LOL
to that last comment,
and maybe it was insensitive
to notice that
you smell better
on Facebook,
look better too.
I love you best
in two dimensions.
I’m trying to find a gif
to show you how
your touch
is overwhelming
and how attending to
all these sensations
is giving me a headache.
Don’t make me
look away
from my screen.
Carol Casey lives in Blyth, Ontario, Canada. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Prairie Journal,The Anti-Langourous Project, Please See Me, Front Porch Review, Cypress, Vita Brevis and others, including a number of anthologies, most recently, We Are One: Poems From the Pandemic and the TL;DR Hope Anthology. Follow her on Twitter @ccasey_carol.
Image by StartupStockPhotos from Pixabay.
Bureau of Complaint 