Landline

I miss the electric hum of a landline.
Some long nights I could hear it listening to itself
as if plugged into several minds all at once.
It was sound without daylight,
night echo’s that lingered into the day.

The words were fragmented, but not garbled,
they were just degrading through space and time,
but all seemed so urgent to be heard
above the droning silence.

Smart phones, those handheld headstones,
so pockmarked with an un-nuanced gossip
that floats away from any precocity;
they lack the twilit conveyance of language,
the sense of passage and auditory peregrination.

Those old telephones had something else,
a kind of life beyond any address - a journeying
of oral acoustics.

There were always voices speaking
in a far background,
from a distant planet or from the past or the future?
I could hear them
as if they were communing through the conduits
of some invisible travelling machinery.

Sometimes it seemed that they were in my ears,
my mind, like a dead vocabulary
that only I could read upon the air,
words wanting to enter me, make me hear
the nearness of them,

on those occasions
I wondered if it was actually
my voice answering my onw thoughts,
calling me,
demanding I bear witness
to everything I was ignoring -
including myself.

poetryfree verse

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