Where is my phone? in Daydreaming on the Porch

I am alone in a place that is utterly familiar.
The same physical surroundings,
but tonight another reality,
a different awareness.

To try to describe it
is to pretend
that it is just as I have said.
But I’ve said nothing yet.
Can I?

I stare at this little computer
in my hand,
a curious little contraption,
that has become the center of my life,
a device,
a machine
that is my portal
to the outside world
of twilight dimensions,
and virtual reality,
consciousness,
time and space.
Or is it all part
of a simulation
in cyberspace,
If they still call it that?

Ultimately,
Too much time alone.
Too much nothingness.
I stare at the hard glass surface
of my phone,
a computer in miniature
where I can access the
Library of Congress, of all things,
and travel back and forth in time
digitally,
Because time means nothing now.

I always see on my screen
a neatly arranged
flotilla of icons,
motionless on the surface
of a dead-calm virtual sea,
but which quickly come to life
with the merest tap of a stylus
in this manufactured waking dream
where what is real
only seems real.
How absurd!

Yet this is what I want
In this moment and the next
and the next and the next,
time gone,
And me, sucked up into it,
quietly,
calmly
because it’s 4 am.

Meanwhile,
This fortress of books and rooms
surrounding me
forms a rather simple maze
for me to lose myself in,
if I so desire.
I cannot begin to process
all that is stuffed
into every available niche and corner.
It is my known universe,
My cluttered and
difficult to negotiate
sanctuary.
My soul’s hideaway.
The repository of my phone.

So I walk from room to room,
picking up one thing here,
another there:
a book, a magazine,
a bag of chips,
a glass of juice.

I am no sooner settled in one place
than I must be up again
and back to where I just came from
moments earlier.
Round and round I go,
Where it stops, nobody knows.
Where is my phone?

Last updated May 04, 2021