Whose voices do I hear
behind the email
as well as that of its author?
Whose complaints come
quietly through the qwerty keyboard
masquerading as personal opinion?
What anger or impatience
is detected in the countenance,
the hurried quip, the ill-judged line?
The flurry and impertinence of the reader
perhaps?
What question lies behind a writer's request
or suggestion?
What hidden facts belie the reader?
What net has constrained this emailer
to cause the question
innocently propounded?
Could it be a medical restriction?
Could it be a lifetime of interrogatories
that forbids, nay, strangles, the writer
to ask the simplest of questions,
to make the simplest of enquiries?
Is it the freedom
to never have to ask questions again,
to pry, to tread where one's presence
is not appreciated but eschewed?
5 December 2021
All Rights Reserved
© 2023 Kenneth Thomas Webb
Written 2 February 2016
Image Courtesy of Bridge of Spies to whom all rights are reserved
