A bit of poetry and phones
May is a wonderful month. It's miraculously connected with phones.
Look: exactly a year ago we celebrated the 60th anniversary of the "House of the rising sun" (rising softphone in our cover version :) — it was released in May 1964. Now we just discovered another two beautiful pieces of poetry regarding phones which appeared in May too.
The first was written by Paul Buchheit in 2021 and is called simply “Phones”:
Phones, phones, phones,
See the people with their phones,
Silver, pink and paisley phones,
On the subways and the buses and the sidewalks, all alone,
Lost in intimate exchanges with their phones, phones, phones.
Hear the murmuring of phones,
In their muffled monotones,
Feel the muted tremulations, like the buzzing of the drones,
Hear the pinging and the dinging of the phones.
Passing time, time, time,
In a strange robotic rhyme,
With the tintinnabulation of the tones, tones, tones,
All the people look the same to me, like clones, clones, clones.
See the driver with the phone,
How it chills you to the bone,
See a world of seven billion navigating all alone,
Through the secret sibilations of the phone, phone, phone, phone, phone, phone, phone.
Awesome.
The second, published a year later, in May 2022, is no less impressive and thrilling — “About the phones” by Robert Wood Lynn:
Closing my car door, you always say - watch for deer and text when you get home. I want to, I do, but I will forget. Time moves and I forget. Look I am trying, I am, but it's not the kind of thing that trying solves.
Once on the side of a highway, a cop told me about dragging a full grown buck out the windshield of a wrecked car all by himself. About the sounds it made, like the devil learning what regret feels like. About the woman it kicked to death in the driver's seat. The phone call he had to make to her grown daughter after whose first question was, Did the deer survive?
Different cop, different time, different highway. Said she keeps her phone on silent then spoke about securing the crime scene in that classroom in Blacksburg where one student shot all the others. Every single one of them had a cell phone, she said, and for hours after every single one rang and rang or vibrated across the floor in the same slow way that blood pools. No one was allowed to answer, no one, so instead the phones rang all night until batteries were empty, voicemails full of thousands "Call me when you get this so I know you're okay". Turns out time moves the way blood does. Batteries too. Runs out like a startled deer across a road.
Listen, I am trying to find a way to tell you this. There are things that trying solves but this is not one of them.
Indeed, May is amazing.
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