Editing My Ex-Lover's Digital Face in Photoshop

When all is virtual all can be changed,

even the face of my past.
Half smile, deep creases, wrinkles, even pimples,

I’m a prestidigitator of pixels.
Slider, pointer, and optical mouse are my magic wands.
In reality she’s far from my touch

but I can retouch her face on screen.
Slide the pointer on the focus filter bar to the right
and her half-smile sharpens to a caustic hard edge.
It’s how I see her today. Or I can recant and pull back
and her skin blurs to silky smoothness,
as it appeared when I first beheld her.
I can saturate her color back to that rainbow glory I saw
when we first said hello or withdraw to the present,

to the grayness of our parting.
Tease her face—I can do that—
tease her out of the background crowd
or slide the contrast back to bland two dimensions,
her face flat among the others.
Lurch to the right on the brightness bar and behold,
her tortured grin fades into blown-out whiteness.
Or I can retreat into darkness,
and darken her cheeks, lips, and dead brown eyes.
Dead brown eyes. Dead brown eyes
Yet I can also lasso a speck of light and clone it
so cheery catchlights gleam from those dull eyes.

I fashion her forced half smile into a warm full one,
by gently nudging the stream of zeros and ones

deep within the heart of the computer.
Abracadabra, hocus pocus, presto chango, Shazam—
for every reality, even her face,
when all is virtual all can be changed

© Richard Fein

Paranoid Hairdo

Once when there were pay phones
I could simply turn away from lip readers.
But now ten thousand voices chatter around me.

Can’t you hear them. I can.
Shh! Even stop the sound of your heartbeats.
There, do you hear the muttering?
For intimate conversations don’t use cell phones.
Beware, hundreds of detectives are casting antennas like fishing rods,
plucking the untellable from the rumor-filled ether
and editing whispers into digital roars.
Now newfangled probes go even deeper, through the skull.

Somewhere someone unseen and far away, I’m sure,
is using an electromagnetic ramrod to crash through my temples.
Or maybe it’s the government agent disguised
as that ten year old staring at me across the street.
The tax money of millions is now used to probe the minds of billions.

I’ll keep my brain contained in a fortress of privacy
and guard my thoughts from being hijacked into humongous
government or enemy or extra terrestrial data storage disks,
wherein fractured bytes of the forbidden and secret desires of humanity
accumulate as blips on virtual balance sheets.
I’ll keep my unspeakable thoughts unspoken and my head covered
with a ceramic bowl and wire hairnet.

Ceramic and metal-mesh headgear,
it muddles thought transmissions, it scrambles brain waves,
it messes up the hair.

© Richard Fein