New Phone Blues

I recently upgraded my phone so I can send text messages faster and so my camera phone shots come out less pixelated — so you can see just how drunk I am in the back of the bar with a slanted grin plastered on the whiskey glass. I avoided it for two years while everyone got Iphones and phones with keyboards. I held onto my flip phone with pride, but last night I threw it on the floor in a moment of soused passion and busted the screen. I was stuck! So I got a new one and now I’m feeling the new phones blues.

I lost all my pictures, all the ways I identified people when they called were lost due to a one second decision to chuck the thing at the wall. But that’s not what I have the blues about. I am mourning the end of the era of my blue LG flip phone. It went everywhere with me and was the vessel to many a great conversation. It was a great friend in some real bad times. Blue LG flip phone, I’m going to miss you. It’s like the passing of a love one. You remember all the things you shared together, the good and the bad.

But my new red LG phone is pretty groovy. I’ll get over the death of my flip as I usher in the era of the burgundy keypad phone. Life moves forward interminably. No matter how much you stick your feet into the ground, you remain in one place, the Earth is spinning like a slow-motion treadmill, and it carries even the sturdiest of fence posts with it. That’s why I’m so dizzy half the time. I can feel it spin-spin-spinning. Unlike some, the touch of the world turns me on. It glides over my body as I lay supine in a field, counting the myriad universes, twinkling, midnight, velvet gossamer.

John Paul Sartre ain’t got nothing on me and my existential ennui. Pity me and all my beauty. Crumple up my brain and discard it with the other recyclables. Make my soul into a plastic bottle and fill it with flowers. High-five! High-five! Life on this planet ended in 1976, the year I was born and the year Punk Rock was discovered. Everything since then has been replicas, simulacrum, and static feedback. There’s no more starving artists, just arts of starving. Just a hollow fisherman by the L.A river with an empty line waiting for the wind to blow this paper sailboat to sea.

Keep me in your heart while I float in the ether of your disgust, hold me close like a match you burn down your house with.

I’m as far West as this continent will allow, still I can’t get far enough away from America to escape the new phone blues. I’ve got Woody Guthrie looking on, shaking his head, and I know damn well this land wasn’t made for you and me.There is no ‘you and me’. There’s just me.

Fuck you, Woody, it wasn’t!!!! Why did you have me believing that for so long?

The only sky is blue, and big, and the only blood that pours is red. Yet… I can’t wait for the poetry to come to me, I have to chase it down like a cab at Times Square, ten minutes after midnight, on New Years. The world is a crow, heckling you. My heart is a bull, charging you.

Take me in your killer’s grip. Fuck the pain away. I look out the window and see the city, blistered and cruel, seething under a bed of neon lights. Call me by my made up name. We’re all extras here. Two-bits and one-timers. We’re all craving the cringe. Feverishly decorating our souls with designer religions, fit bodies, and death citrus. I have a new phone and it’s so cute and fancy it makes me feel hollow and morbid.

Los Angeles, so sour and bitter, let me taste your lemony kiss.

I am a robot that can only compute sadness.

Los Angeles, you are my lonesome home.