response poem: For Once, Then, Uber

After Robert Frost's "For Once, Then, Something"

See the inspiration for this poem here.

Others taunt me with having waited at curbs,
always late to the light, so never seeing
deeper down in the newsfeed where the party
gives me back in a shining surface picture
me, myself in the red party belonging,
looking out of a screen of metal and glass. 

Once, when hailing Uber on a dirty curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
something more than pixels – and then I lost it.  
Texts came to rebuke the too clear screen.
One from my friend, and lo, another
shook whatever it was lay there in pixels,
Froze it, restarted the app. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A smile? Grimace? For once, then, something. 

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