Office Hours (click here - to hear Alice read this poem)

hickory
dickory
click
of computer keyboard
from the next cubicle

tick
tick-tick
chatter of mice teeth
behind the bland buttocks
of padded office dividers

three blind walls
and my back
to the window

tick-tick
tick

I long for the farmers wife
to come down the hall with a carving knife
and chop computer cable
like the gristle of rodent tail

tick
tick tick

and the clock strikes
one as going
so
damn
slow

© Alice Major
(e-poem) (home)

Messages from Planet E

Anybody out there?
All these signals
we pump out, like a popcorn maker
puppling in the lobby of a movie theatre.
TV twaddle. Cops talking tough
on the police band. Spotlights
with their high beams on, parked
at shopping centres. Electronic snatches
of Bach and Jerry Lee Lewis. All of them
rocketed out into space, racketing round
forever.

The whole planet a small, throbbing
blinking jukebox floating around the sun.
Like the only house in a quiet neighbourhood
where a late-night party is going on
and people are breaking glass
and shouting on the lawn and turning up the bass
on the stereo, while the rest of the street
peeks out from window curtains, wishes
they'd all shut up and go to sleep.

We're just hopeful -- hurling signals
that, by some wild coincidence,
might be intercepted and decoded.
As long as we're out there
surfing the electromagnetic waves,
cruising the blacktop with our ghetto
blasters all a-blare -- well, then we'd still exist.
Even if, back home, someone's called
the police at last, and the inevitable law
arrived, and the cells are dark and cold,
and we're sorry now . . .

© Alice Major
(e-poem) (home)