Howard Firkin
You’d almost call me lonely if it wasn’t
for the Echo / Sound Test Service… Hello
pretty English girl instructing me,
who lets me talk to her, records my words
as carefully as if she meant to tie
them with a ribbon, hide them tenderly
beneath her handkerchiefs, and re-discover
them in thirty years, remembering
the one, the one man who, in all those years,
responded in a way that she responded
to, the one whose message wasn’t just
a testing, testing or a blah blah blah.
You almost call me, don’t you? But you don’t.
I’ll never hear you tell me who you are.
