Beware the intimate Internet!
Beware the chatrooms with closed doors
Where naked names cruise midnight shores
And fall in love before they've met.

Beware, O wives and husbands real,
The lonely rivals virtual
Whose words, or chaste or sexual,
May from your beds affections steal.

Beware the posh imagination,
More vivid far than earthly flesh.
Beware the way two dreams can mesh
In ecstasy beyond sensation.

Beware the fantasy that speaks,
The vague ideal that springs a soul.
No marriage can avoid the shoal
That lies beneath such sun-drenched peaks.

No love but may retreat to stone
As sirens sad the heart entice.
Two names entwine in paradise
While here two lovers lie alone.


written by Nicholas Gordon