Dead Wires

Now the quiet pedestrians are the odd ones.
But just a few years ago,
those who talked to themselves or screamed at phantoms
or literally laughed out loud at their own jokes
were given wide berth on city streets by the silent multitude of
passersby.
But change has charged the air with electric oscillations
plugging into ever more breast pockets and pocketbooks.
Loneliness is being shouted down by cell phone cacophony.
The world grows noisier.
Today, the mumbling majority walk the streets in supposed
perfect sanity.

So now it’s the silent ones who haunt the sidewalks,
the odd wanderers who need no phones,
those to whom no one wants to listen,
those who have no one to listen to,
the disconnected, the never connected,
the brotherhood of the ignored,
the sisterhood of the shunned,
the figurative deaf mutes who travel
beyond all the service areas,
those isolated circuits,
those shaggy frayed dead wires
dangling off the network of the modern world.