Two Poems

By Joanne Walton

Zoom Call or Seance?

Hello?
Are you there?
Can you hear me?
We’ll just wait another couple of minutes
Some others might join
Turn your camera on
We can’t hear you
Your microphone’s on mute
Your microphone
Mute
Yes
There you are!
I can hear seagulls
Turn your microphone off
The picture is lagging
The connection is bad
Try turning your camera off
Oh, there you are!
No, you’ve frozen
Hello? Hello?
Back again!
Host has finished session

We’re all a bit Max Headroom –

We’re all a bit Max Headroom –

Only dressed in our pyjamas –

Since we only meet on Zoom

Glitching screens become our doom

And we gurn like frozen llamas.

We’re all a bit Max Headroom,

Hair all frizzy like a broom;

Blotchy skin like an iguana’s

Since we only meet on Zoom.

Our houses become our tombs,

With unchanging panoramas.

We’re all a bit Max Headroom –

How can we relieve the gloom?

Tik tok dancing like bananas!

Since we only meet on Zoom.

We’re all baking bread like loons;

Watching television dramas.

We’re all a bit Max Headroom

Since we only meet on Zoom.

Jo forgot her age and remembered her passion, giving up her job to study Creative and Professional Writing at Plymouth University.  She has not looked back.  

I wrote both poems around December 2020 for a university assignment but finally went with a prose piece so didn’t use them. Both poems are reflective of my experience of using Zoom and Teams video calls for lectures during the pandemic.  

‘Zoom Call or Seance’ was written in December, but this week a meme with the same theme has shown up on my Facebook feed.  Clearly someone else has seen the correlation!

‘We’re All a Bit Max Headroom’ was my first attempt at writing a villanelle and became a fun introduction to the act of writing in that form.  Again, the content is reflective of my experience of Zoom calls and semi-ferral appearance during the pandemic. Max Headroom was an 80s TV talking head character known for its glitching and unfortunately this is how I saw many of my fellow ‘Zoomers’ as my own dodgy wifi connection dipped in and out throughout our online meetings.