Poetry Sunday: Robocall by Vijay Seshadri

Do you have a landline telephone? I realize that Millenials think of that as something from a distant stone age of technology, but we have held on to ours, even as we use our cell phones for most things. It's a mostly innocuous instrument. Except during election season. Our landline phone rings fairly constantly these days, and it's not our friends calling. No, it's people who want us to take opinion surveys or they want money from us for their campaigns, as well as a fair number of scams that try to trick us into doing something we don't want to do. Mostly, it's robocalls. 

And as for those cell phones, mine dings throughout the day announcing texts from campaigns that need just a few dollars more from me to put them over the top. Otherwise, all will be lost. And not to forget my email box that fills up with their messages every day. In other words, there is no escape unless one wants to totally take a detour off the information highway. But the robocalls are the worst and the most intrusive, even though (thanks to caller ID) we don't answer them. Honestly, November 4 can not come quickly enough.

Vijay Seshadri feels our pain.    

Robocall 

by Vijay Seshadri

Three or four brand-new ideas—not crisp
or sensical but, still, helpful to me—

slipped entirely from my mind
when I ran to get the phone, and heard once again
the 1-800 voice of the One saying,

“If I am He or She or They Who is here
when the last star hisses out, why am I talking to you?
I was thinking of you this morning, but why you?
Para español oprima numero tres.”

Another day ruined by the question of being.
When will they just let me sit under my guava tree?—
eating my guavas, thinking my quarantined thoughts,
nursing my mortified body.

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