I press “publish.” The poem becomes a pixel. Equal among equals. Without memory of the months of silence that prepared it.
A coffee machine ad. Casualty counts. A stanza.
My finger pauses for a fraction of a second – not from recognition, but from a glitch in the rhythm. The form is different. The lines are shorter. Between them is air the algorithm did not foresee.
Then my finger moves on.
For a poem in this coordinate system, there is no place to be received. A poem requires silence as a prerequisite for its emergence. Not the absence of sound – an ontological condition. Digital infrastructure is built on total signal. It is anti-silence by definition.
Poetry forced to fight for attention in a flow of traffic turns into content. Content cannot be presence. It can only be a message.
There is a dimension invisible from the outside. A poem may arrive in ten minutes – but after months of silence that prepared it. A concentrate of time. When I press publish, this concentrate becomes a pixel weighing zero seconds.
A poem exists in vertical time. The feed – in horizontal time. The impossibility of a meeting is built into the architecture.
Digital time erases this memory. A side effect of the interface.
In a virtual environment, the word has lost its weight. Poetry is a return to the flesh of language. To its sonic backbone. A poem restores the habit of perceiving oneself as a body through a rhythm that coincides with a heartbeat.
This language has too much flesh for sterile time. The process does not stop in the absence of an observer.
The right to verticality is not denied. It is ignored as a non-functioning interface feature.
The ontological status of a word does not depend on its visibility. A poem that no one has read – exists. A word spoken precisely – has occurred.
A poem does not need a reader to exist. Just as gravity does not need a witness to pull.
Verticality does not disappear because it is no longer being looked at.
It simply is.