the delete button allows you to take back
what you have said,
erase what you have written,
what has gone wrong or gotten sentimental
it gives you countless times to start over,
to keep quiet, this time or the next,
if you still don’t have anything better to say,
if you still haven’t come up with a good excuse
to interrupt & add your two cents
it gives you, a repeat offender, the opportunity
to correct on the fly your misspellings & discrepancies,
your occasional blunders before others
get a chance to hear you, to read between the lines
it allows you to undo
what no one else knows that took place,
to ignore muscle memory & agree, for a change,
with conventional wisdom
& act as if it didn’t happen, as if it didn’t hurt
& it takes you back to primary school
& your c-minus c-plus high school education,
to memories of your number 2 pencil eraser
& paper mate all-purpose liquid paper
nonchalantly inviting or enticing you
to hack into your own personal computer,
to locate & isolate not your soul or mind
but your own keyboard
& coping mechanism
the one you aren’t certain, if given the choice,
that you would consider,
that you would run to press & hold
to see what you could forget, what you could forgive
it allows you, if you’re into that sort of thing,
to update upgrade a myth
on your own terms, on a small scale,
to experience the health benefits
of the overly protected waters of the lethe
without you first getting a concussion
or needing x number of blows to your head,
without you having to die on you yourself
or on someone less fortunate
it gives you the opportunity
to send to the showers a learned behavior,
to point the finger at the keyboard,
at an object & not a foreign or domestic subject,
not at someone else
it takes you back to the burning of books,
to the shredding of evidence,
&, how apropos, to the flushing of the toilet,
the blowing of your nose
c. a. campos, 2010
