Poems on the Phone

I’m on the phone.

In a phone box. In the street. And it is summer. And it is July.

This is how I get my kicks. Because I am dictating poems down the line.

This is my life.

I’ll tell you what I do. I dial a random number and give the person on the end one of my poems out of the blue. I sock it to them, slop it to them, slap it to them, shock it to them.

They don’t know who I am. There’s articles about me in the paper – ’Phantom Phone Poet Strikes Again’- but no-one knows my secret identity.

I live for this. My life is my art. My cracked lips are so close to the mouthpiece, they are brushing against it. For the sake of my art, I risk picking up bacteria and gunge and God knows what.

But I always feel isolated in a phone box. I can’t escape myself. I am trapped in a small space with myself. I think of them as vertical coffins, that the phone company has placed on street corners to force people to consider, or meet, themselves. Maybe the phone company doesn’t want us to communicate with others, it wants us to focus on ourselves.

That’s how it is – that’s a phrase that keeps coming back to me: that’s how it is.

Who else has stood here, in this place? And what did they say, and to whom? If you had hidden a secret tape recorder in the corner, and recorded everything for the last ten weeks, what would you have? Would the recording surprise you about human nature, or would it tell you just what you already knew?

I finish off my current poem. I get the impression I must have dialled a phone by the seaside because I can hear water washing around in the background, and lonely seagulls. Some old woman picked up the phone and said, ’Is that you Edith?’

Maybe it’s some pensioner in some bungalow on a seafront. You can almost hear the candyfloss.

I decided to give her three bursts from the poetry machine – ’The World Is Nice In Blue’, which is a poem about my love of curtains, ’Putting the Kettle On,’ which I wrote during the miners’ strike in the eighties, and ’The Encyclopaedia of Yesterday’, which is about my love of writing poems.

I always pause at the end of a recital, before I hand the receiver up, but I’m not sure why. Am I waiting for applause? A gasp of recognition? A sob of sorrow from a heart newly moved? Maybe even for a poem in return? Well then, for any kind of communication?

But often there’s nothing. Just nothing. No abuse, no applause, just a nothingness of a response.

It’s the same with this old lady. No reply. She’s just sitting there with the receiver saying nothing. It crosses my mind that maybe she wants more poems and she’ll be upset if I put the phone down, but I’m not sure. I give it a few more seconds and hang up. Feels strangely deflating, empty. I need a response but I’m not getting any.

I look up – because I have been looking down at my shoes and the concrete floor, to concentrate – and see the reflection of my face in the plastic front of the phone. And that surprises me, what I see.

It is me, but it is also like someone else. It is a picture of a ghost that has haunted me all my life – the older version of me that I have often wondered about – but it haunts me in that it isn’t how I had pictured myself. I had imagined a more confident, successful person. Stronger.

But this loser looking back at me doesn’t come up to scratch. Some other bloke. The ghost in the plastic glass. There is still the fear in his eyes, the weakness, and the disappointment that I have always felt. The feelings that I had thought would go away are still there.

And I realise that they will always be there. I will always be the same person. I will never change, in the way I had confidently day-dreamed that I would do. I think back to my life in the past, that big well of accumulations and debris that we call the past, and how I had pictured this, that and the other in my mind about the future – I would change into this or that, I would improve for the best, I would develop, I would go forwards. Hope.

The future was the place where all my problems would be solved and all my character failings would be rectified. But at the end of the day they were just comforting but unrealistic thoughts. I had been deceiving myself so often, and hadn’t realised it.

And I had often congratulated myself at the time for my optimism, but I think that my imagination has just confirmed that I am a loser.

[end of extract]

Copyright © Paul Badger 2008

~ by Paul Badger on 25 April, 2008.