To the Delete Button

Up in the top right hand corner

of any keyboard

like a handle on a toilet,

you are maybe too much 

of an improvement

on the back of the pencil,

on the bottle of Liquid Paper.

Delete Button you are 

a wide kind of button

wider than the button

for any symbol 

you might undo.

Like a brake pedal,

your width is sensible

and also like a brake pedal

frequency of use tends

to correspond to less

overall skill.  "I can still

write just fine by hand,

thanks," say many writers,

and I say that too, and I am 

fucking dreaming.  

Delete Button, I never write 

anything serious 

without you. I touch you 

more than any key

save the space bar.  Shit,

I tap you like a cracked out lab rat.

I hold you down and watch you go,

watch you swallow  

lumplessly!  You amaze me.

Delete Button, I am pretty

sure you have 

secretly retrained 

the whole tapping clicking 

word-processing

mob of all of us.

Right under our finger, 

you have changed 

literature like the pill

changed sex

like the stirrup changed 

8th century horse warfare.  

You are like a safety net 

that is actually 

a trampoline; we can try 

so much more 

because of you.  And so we do. 

Wiper-outer of 

false starts, mulligan

manufacturer, reset button

on the gray Nintendo

 [max high difficulty

cartridge of poetry],

creator of cool edgy

bad-mood holes, turner 

of chicks into eggs; 

what can't you unsay?

Typos, awkward 

phrasings, all 

of Shakespeare: 

it's all the same to you.

A rooster, said Bly, 

will scratch up 

a Rembrandt

same as a newspaper

if it's left on the floor of its crate.

I stare at this analogy

and shake my head

and begin to reach for you,

as if you haven't

touched every line, every gesture.

To the Door to my Mother’s Bedroom

You are one 

of thousands of doors 

to mothers’ bedrooms

in thousands of identical floorplans

that were framed up on the outskirts of American cities

in the decades after World War II.

Neither of us are so special.

To you I came.  At you I stopped,

an occasion for second thoughts.  

You stood in the night like a guard 

with crossed arms while I evaluated 

my bad dream, my sore throat,

the noises of my father a floor below.

I'd take your dull brass knob 

full of seriousness in my hand.

I’d lift the whole rectangle of you up 

a fraction of an inch to keep 

your bottom from scraping the floor.

I’d gulp and push and  –  

No, I’d abort, turn on heel, retreat down the hall.

Proud little devil.  Fool.

Door to My Mother’s Bedroom,

I spent too much time wishing 

that you were the door to my parents' bedroom.

But that just wasn't you.

In your defense, never once were you locked.

Never once did you swing closed in my face.

Behind you was a comfort 

I didn’t want to need.

On both sides of you: aloneness, patterns, pride.  

Door to no one’s room now, 

chipped mute hollow panel, still bluish white 

in the imperfect dark, how I regret

not walking through you

when there was someone alive behind you

able to solve any ill the night could invent.