Making connections

It's not just bloggers who despair of connecting. Here's my friend John Ahearn on the subject

Hello? Hello?

I’ve never called the chat line before,
but lately I don’t seem able to lose
the feeling that life ought to be something more
than this incomprehensible puppet show.
I’m living a life, I guess, but I wonder whose.
Do you know what I mean? Is anyone there? Hello?

I just thought there might be someone there
who might possibly feel the same way,
who might be fending off the same despair
at being irresistibly jigged along,
a ghost in an Indonesian shadow play,
on for a tattered caper, a mothy song,

before they rattle out the god machine
and kill the agonists and clear the hall.
Are we just another skirmish on the screen,
a flurry of jointed dolls that never meet
except where our outlandish shadows fall
apart, together on a wrinkled sheet?

Surely I’m not the only one to find
the script inadequate, the lines I read
unequal to the pageant in my mind.
Surely someone’s wondering tonight
if anything means as much as a mustard seed,
whether we’re dust in the wind, or lantern light.

Is no one else ever terrified
gazing deep into the frigid night sky?
Hasn’t anyone out there ever cried
to heaven, cried aloud to the endless black
vacuum waiting to take us in? Am I
the last shivering insomniac?

Talk to me. Speak up. The meter’s on.
The house extracts a steady reckoning
for silence, too: my change is almost gone.
Why will you not speak? You’re there, I know.
I can hear you breathing, like a living thing.
Hello? Is anyone there? Hello? Hello?