Screen Break
A Poem
Mute the kettle and the coffee machine
Even a tea break is two-dimensional
Like all the other meetings
Workwise or otherwise,
Stop a moment and turn to the window,
The transparent glass window, that is,
Not the framed patch of pixels
Crisp and bright with liquid crystals,
See the grey or the blue,
Concrete, trees, paint, weather;
There are birds preening
As a cat watches, twitching its tail.
Look,
Someone’s out there
In the silent
Urban wild!
Hurrying to their dangerous job,
Masked and mysterious,
A superhero
At the supermarket till,
A van screams hot pink lettering:
“Emergency plumbing”,
And a redundant hotelier
Delivers pizza on a bicycle,
A youth, hoodie up, saunters,
Granny’s groceries in tight fists
Leaving it at the door
As a sacred offering —
The sounds of jaunty electronics
Zoom back into my ears
Signifying the return
To the real world behind a screen.
