Landline
My telephone is hard-wired to the wall
And cannot dog me everywhere I go
Nor wreck a walk with an insistent call
Nor hook me on some silly game or show.
It doesn’t even cast a pallid glow
By which to read a menu in a bar
Or light my face up, ghostly, from below
Or raise an homage to some vocal star.
My landline phone can’t track me in my car
Or sell me to the admen, snoops, and crooks,
And won’t presume to be my avatar.
It’s always where I left it, shelved with books.
In other words, it’s light-years in advance
Of phones that yank your strings and make you dance.
Dan Campion has contributed poetry to previous issues of Light and to Able Muse, Blue Unicorn, Ekphrasis, The Evansville Review, Measure, The Midwest Quarterly, The North American Review, Poetry, Rolling Stone, Shenandoah, and Think. He co-edited Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song, a third edition of which was published in spring 2019 in honor of Whitman’s 200th birthday, May 31.