Kerri Shying R # 224 - Slot B

Slot B

the phone calls they crept up

in price    at first  the STD call

 we husbanded as sheep

I am old enough              I heard the pip pip pip

of the three minute tone

some            would simply ring off            mid sentence  I was

 born to local calls that went along for hours             for twenty cents           

 so much so            that Dad told the love-lorn in our ranks

 take it on the heel and toe across the road

to the public phone booth

 to croon  and strategise            

we could look out and see a brother perched up on the shelf for phone books       

glowing in the night            a pile of platypus  by  Slot A

 it was fair      nobody would have ever gotten through to our house

not in twenty years            now            now in this day  we don’t call houses    

 there are no houses       there are just people

uncollected            all free    awaiting algorithmic selection

all  timing            by the second  

     these days

 I have lost my tilt with time 

 drift through  seven hundred things to watch  on youtube           

find nothing   lost in interest

the world begs of me an outraged mind            matchless by reply           

unbuilt               my space     unwrapped     my time            

all the while beguiled

 this  high cost

here  keeping   of touch