Empathy, offline

I’m not fond of reading poetry online,
it hurts my eyes from the staring.
(docs will tell you to look away for 5 minutes
every 15, but who can do that when you work
all day at that machine, staring for hours straight
even though you rarely pay attention).
And the doing of it lacks the empathy I feel when
immersed in a book of poetry, or even a scrap
of paper torn from a journal.
I feel little connection with the author (or the subject,
or the predicate, or the vowels, or anything)
because of the nature of the net;
the poem is not in my hands, I carry it not in my head,
walking with me where I walk, breathing into me as I inhale
and carrying with it the forum of my mind upon exhalation.
Instead, I see it only as pixels reproduced on my screen,
while the reality of the poem is stored away in some far off,
air conditioned-cold, subterranean server room,
an entire author’s works crammed into an area
smaller than my fingernail (one electronic hiccup
and everything that ever was Sandburg is gone,
sloughed off into cyberspace).
A poem in my inbox is better, because I feel as if it has Arrived,
as if via special delivery (my own personal copy
of The Fog, or Dickenson’s No. 6) as the author
must feel when that poem is first Published.
But I still feel a need to print it out, and take it to the couch
for comfortable perusing.
No, I really need book in hand, and my sandwich in the other,
while sitting at the lunch counter, or on stone steps,
or with my back against a library wall (places where one
can appreciate the world’s workings and mechanisms)
to properly inhale the endeavors of one mad mind or another
(if poets were sane, they would not write)
before adding to the exhalation my own demented musing.