My disaffected desire
Meets your disembodied voice on the line,
Dizzy trepidation mingling with excitement
With every shared sentence;
And my conviction is for time alone with you
My shackles are for picking up my phone
And dialing your digits and breathing your name,
Bars on my cellphone becoming time behind bars
For violating the conditions of my parole.
The call was not toll-free
And neither are we,
Our love strung across long distance
Like an electrical wire stretching from pole to pole,
Charged and leaning into its own fragility
Desperate to connect current from one point to the next.
I find myself lost in the system
Shuffled through circuitry,
Struggling to decipher meaning from
The popping and crackling of
Circular conversations along the way.
Phantoms of longing linger in the static,
Pain amplified like a radio wave,
As I lie awake in my cellular bed,
Wondering if I’ll ever recover.