On the Mississippi

I watch the steamboats
tick by
like inches
on a long mile,
and since the heart, too, abhors
a vacuum
I shutter my eyes
on the photographic
swell: a bridge unfolding
in afternoon, children
sledding down a grass slope
on crushed cardboard
boxes. These photos
are for my son, I miss him,
and because they are not
caught on an i-phone
and texted to a blog
or even
twittered, I coin a term:
mystic media,
that is
something social
published in a blind
book whose
lines you pass
at the dinner table
or when you spoon
just the right amount
of brown sugar
into a bowl of oatmeal
some Sunday morning.
Everyone everywhere
is doing it differently
so that aptures
of ideas
travel quickly
before they can be
considered or cared for
all that much. They blink
their phones
and the street graffiti
or clownish figure
travels
to the ones
who connected or
chose to follow
such floatings. This makes
of life
a game
of tag,
you're it.