I’m bad tempered and upset,
Feeling tired isolated alone
Sitting hopefully waiting for
Someone to answer the phone .
I just want to hear
A normal human voice
But these days my dears
You don’t get a choice.
Androgynous, emotionless
It’s going off again
Promising an answer but
Never saying when,
Any second now and we
Know what it will say,
Your call is important
Please don’t go away.
When somebody invented
Automatic answer machine
Life got more complicated
Than it had ever been
Then the multi choice options
To save wasting their time
But they just don’t bother
About them wasting mine.
There used to switchboards
With real people to call,
Probably shoved out on the dole,
Machines don’t need wages at all.
The inventor of this obscenity
Is over the seas living in style
A successful and much lauded
Multi faceted rain and tax exile.
All I can say is,
Enjoy it while you can.
One day you may meet
One very angry man
Who’s spent ages feeling
Isolated and all on his own
As he’s waited and waited
To be answered on the phone
Every doggie has,
In time, their day
And, oh brother may be mine
To make him slowly pay.
Categories:
switchboards, anger,
Form: Rhyme
She vibrates, a chassis minus shock absorption.
A painting, the nude descends a staircase,
rings of Saturn etched in a vacuum tube.
Or Eniac of twisted cords and switchboards.
She isn't programmed to see light beams
spraying through the trees,
nor silver bearings of morning dew.
There are no bees plunging like pistons
in the flowers, no circuit board on the step.
She climbs the jamb as a bot returning to its task.
Monitors flicker as nanoseconds pass unnoticed,
but the galaxy ends at the lintel.
She's a child of Mir, suspended upside down
in a universe where falling isn't death,
but the failure of electrodes.
Then silent as a dead star she descends.
All drives cease functioning.
She is still as a scarab,
the light years casting sand dunes on sphinxes,
until legs spasm as though coding
a final matrix for iron butterflies waiting to be born.
Categories:
switchboards, insect, technology,
Form: Imagism
My place of work they used to call ”Ma Bell”
As switchboard operator, “number please”
Became my tool of their “advanced intel”
With wires and plugs held to connect parties.
Three days a week from three to ten, my job
Was set; with school next day, I soon burned out.
My arms and back were sore, began to throb
From stretching here and there and all about
To find and reach, connect the lines between
The callers and the called through panel holes.
Soon tired and aching with this job routine
I knew this one would never meet my goals.
No doubts about my choice have haunted me…
Switchboards dissolved with new technology!
© Sandra M. Haight 2014
All Rights Reserved
~3rd Place~
Contest: Jobs
Sponsor: Sara Kendrick
Judged: 12/11/2014
Categories:
switchboards, jobs,
Form: Sonnet