TOUCHING - by Bill Wootton

Driving behind cars, you see them clearly,
ranged across glossy duco on boot lids.
Finger marks. As if some brute tune
were to be wrung from mere metal.
Where once a centrally positioned
handle sucked all hands to its chrome vortex,
now boot slamming begins flathandedly
from anywhere along that closing rim.

Once you'd be roared at for touching
any such fine surface, metal or glass.
Now fingers glide for hours over iPads,
phones. We rake hard surfaces, seeking no
handle. We get up close and contiguous.
Reflections diminish as on we blur.


- Bill Wootton
- Australian poet

 Bill Wootton is a regular contributor to poetryetc, a weekly online journal and has produced 'Crossroads', a short collection of poems, in 2014. He has lived on a bush block in Cottles Bridge north of Melbourne for ten years. Soon he will be be moving to Hepburn Springs in Central Victoria.