Fingerfluffs

Fingerfluffs

Ev’ryone makes typos,
Where a silly misspelled rush of prose
Is hiccupped in its fluency –
Careless hands work careless labours,
Jumping cases, catching neighbours,
Letters standing in for others,
Covering their brothers’ truancy.

For as our fingers run and leap
And waltz and peck,
Too busy to go back and check,
So in the errors creep.
Too quick they ran, too soon they leapt,
And where our eyes should intercept,
They’re mesmerized by finger-dances,
Only sparing random glances
At the all-important screen.
Or else they stare out straight ahead
To read instead the words unseen,
That float midair, as thick as flies –
The copytext behind the eyes.
But if we’re lucky, underlines in red
Will warn us what we’ve said
And give us chance to clean.
But otherwise, each error cries unheard,
Each mangled word and un-snipped thread
Is slurred by digits over-keen.

So ev’ryone makes typos,
Where our textual flows get bent and dented,
Letters get disoriented,
Weakening intent –
They may look careless and inept,
But these days we’re all quite adept
At reading what was really meant.