I touch the letters of your name
cold, unresponsive, grave,
and cry.
Is there anybody there?
Why do you not respond?
Poised in limbo I await
the two grey ticks.
Delivered.
Changing to blue.
Read.
A wordless silence.
I'm haunted by your absence.
Ghosted by the machine.
Every year your haloed profile
is fused to comments
of demonic dialogue
in the echo chamber
of media purgatory,
Where we went to war,
And are now restless forevermore,
Shrouded in that smoke-ring tilt.
You died too young.
We were once flesh
Beyond the digital ether
Where memories sleep.
My guilty ghost in the machine.
The actor is cold
But the character sighs,
No priest can banish
What the screen retains.
Childhood memory trapped in a frame
Of CGI animation.
Just press play and rewind
Or tilt your head
For the full gif show.
And I raise a glass to absent friends,
Not because you died, but for how you live.
Ghostly imagery,
Forever hosted in the machine.
(Suzanne Fairless-Aitken - Feb '26)
