Gentle People

No-one notices, just like those passing shapes sunk mind deep in worlds whose gravity pulls life inwards towards a nowhere no larger than a screen. The real is detached. Thoughts, feelings, you, all wired to what inhabits a dimension midway between make believe and a hard place - lives and nations wait suspended in a state whose future sits on the end of a finger. Horror is always "over there", quarantined from view, dissolving into constructs manufactured in the silicon lobes of an artificial brain. Then, grinding away at the bottom of a wordless pit, an inescapable sense that someone or something is watching you. And in this rising din of bangs, beating drums and bottled screams in double glazed rooms, where are the voices of the gentle people, the good people who softly walk the earth still carrying a reverential wonder for creation and a book of poems by that patron saint of the human soul, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson.