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Though provisional, pencil and paper are safer.
Attacking words with a rubber requires
considerable conscious effort.

I lost a precious poem
digitally transcribed into Word.
A careless click of the mouse
was all it took to send it tumbling
out of Windows to a virtual void
of non-recoverable recycling.

Never mind.
How can unimaginably long strings
of binary bits and bytes be beautiful anyway?
Repeating recitals of ones and zeros
must be mind-numbingly boring.

There are hard times
on the hard drive.

I lost my paper note.
I am annoyed.
It might be down the back of the sofa

or in my head.