Emo No No

The tekkies have reduced emotions
to little cartoons
and renamed them emojis.

Words erased and replaced
by clapping hands and smiley faces and upward thumbs.

Tekkies don’t have time for small talk.
Communication is a challenge to be coded and corralled.

Express sadness with a frown,
joy with a smile,
amusement with a gaping grin.

Perhaps language will be swallowed by ASCII.
All that boring drivel dissected and deleted.

Essays erased.
Poetry plundered.
Novels neutralized.

A wake-up call, my fellow writers:
The emojis are coming. Take up your pens!

Put your feelings into prose or poetry.
Relish complete sentences and precise expression.
Simile, metaphor, allusion, alliteration.
symbolism, personification.

If language is fated for extinction, let the finale be recorded in words —
glorious, eternal, inspiring, rousing, memorable, remarkable words!