At a Loose End

No one is answering the telephone,

and so the telephone answers itself.

‘Hello, you’ve reached the telephone,’ it says.

‘Either there’s nobody home, which I can’t verify,

as I’m a telephone, or somebody’s here,

but they’re avoiding you.

Of course, they might not be avoiding you specifically,

but, rather, avoiding people in general,

but seeing you’re in the “people in general”

part of the Venn diagram as well,

either way: you are being avoided.

This is all conjecture on my part,’ adds the telephone,

‘because, as I said, I’m just a telephone.’

‘Oh,’ comes the reply, ‘I think I might have the wrong number. Is this Dave?’

‘What do you mean by wrong number?’ asks the telephone.

‘How can a number be wrong?

Surely it would be more accurate – and honest – for you to say,

“It seems I’m incapable of carrying out

even the simplest of tasks, like dialling Dave’s telephone number.

There’s nothing wrong with your telephone number –

good luck to it; it’s just a number –

however, I am an idiot.”

Is Dave’s number any more difficult to dial than,

say, I don’t know, someone like Alan’s number?’

‘I don’t know anyone called Alan,’ comes the reply.

‘Well, that’s a bit ironic,’ says the telephone,

‘seeing as you just dialled his number.’

‘Oh!’ says the caller. ‘I’m so sorry. I have dialled the wrong number.’

‘No,’ says the telephone, ‘we’ve been through this, haven’t we?’

But the caller has hung up, and the line has gone dead.

‘…the line has gone dead?’ says the telephone

in a genuinely surprising turn of events,

‘What sort of clumsy grammatical construction is that?

I thought you were supposed to be a poet?

Oh, let me guess: you’re using poetic licence;

how very convenient for you.’

‘Well, Alan’s telephone,’ I say, ‘impressed as I am

by your unique attainment of telephonic sentience,

I’m not going to argue semantics with you.

“The line has gone dead” is idiomatic, perfectly accurate,

and has no reliance on poetic licence.’

‘I thought you weren’t going to argue semantics,’ says Alan’s telephone.

‘Although “has gone dead” is surely a matter of syntax?

If you’d said, “The line has gone septic”

that might have given us cause to argue semantics.

As it is, the argument you are avoiding is one of syntax.’

But the poem has gone dead,

and Alan’s telephone finds himself, once again, at a loose end.