International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day

...which I also forgot about, like so many other people. Maybe its hour has passed? At any rate, what I've got is a poem I forgot I'd written, and found by accident. Warning: This may be fairly obvious.

THE BLACK TELEPHONE

It rings in the night, inside
your closet, under your bed. In that
spare guestroom you never use. When you
pick up the receiver, you smell
someone else’s breath. The dial-tone
skips like a heartbeat. At first,
only dead air. Then some vague
water-logged words, unfathomable.

This is the drone of bees, the slur
of shifting earth, of silt. This is
the underground din of termites
dug deep and murmuring, hunger-drunk,
a crowd-wide madness of consumption
that will leave them homeless, dead
in sheaves, the wood gone to wax-paper,
a killing-jar hive.

Communication comes at a price. Language
infects. The wire spreads its blight, its vector.

Where are you calling from? You ask.
A distant voice answers, speaking no human tongue,
with no human tongue. Nothing you recognize.
Yet you reply courteously, patiently, telling it:
No, I don’t know you; I can’t make out what you’re
saying. Who? There is no one here by that name. No;
I don't know. How did you get this number?

What do you mean, 'what number'?

And there's a real post to be made, but probably not tonight. It's been raining all day, a slow drip torment, sapping everything. I can barely keep my eyes open.