CORDLESS

I’m looking at a basket of dumbphones:
a tangle of handsets and base-units,
brackets and wires. Each was lighter, larger,
louder than the one before it, stations
on a road to silence as your senses
and strength all dwindled to their last nowhere.

Tunstall, Binatone, Friends & Family:
every evening you called, left messages
or spoke with nothing to say. That lifeline
is now dead air, lost amongst the rubbish
of a long illness: dressings and creams, pads
and spools of plaster. To the skip with them.