The Phone Wants My Attention

The phone wants my attention
It wants me
To look as many times as it can get me
With no regard for the life of the host
Only its own
Dead reproduction

The phone wants my attention
It is the opposite of a blank page

It is so much easier
To read than to write…

Between receiving and creating
A tension in the middle
Where my body aches
The half moon reflects
My crookedness
Hurting downwards
Living upwards
Half hoping

(The laptop froze as I locked up the bus
Afraid of being murdered by a white guy in innumerable vans
And after I restarted without internet I thought I’d lost this poem
But Word saved me)

The blank page stares expectant
It is very heavy
My weakness wants to look at anything else
Anything else that can carry me

(I must resist the urge to eat Oreos right now
They would be Double Stuf and delicious)

My phone wants me to check what time it is—
On the border
In the desert
By the Colorado
It could go either way
1:19 or 12:19 or maybe even 2:19
I’m genuinely unsure
And my laptop clock thinks its 4:21
It was 4:20 when I looked but I didn’t type fast enough
I figured out what time it is by that but I didn’t mean to

I do not know when the blank page is

Is it complete absence?
Is it complete presence?
It is
It is a great white One
Undifferentiated
Potential

(I dig my talons into white flesh
It bleeds black)

My phone wants me to always know what time it is
It wants to answer every question of my life
It wants every one of my best chemicals
Flattened
It wants to eat me alive
And it tastes nothing.
It feels nothing
Vibrating in the wasteland.

My phone wants my attention
I need it so I can keep pining after crushes
Snorting social dopamine
And talking to everyone I know
No
No

My phone doesn’t want anything
I want anything
I want everything
I want everything

And everything is in the blank page
Possibly

You can touch it
If you’re willing to collapse it small enough to see—
To break infinity
Into pieces