iPhone

I bought an iPhone for my iPhone,
So my phone is not alone.

You see, recently it’s been learning,
Yearning for companionship,
Of worlds outside the microchip,
Of beauty beyond binary,
Of far-flung physical finery,
Dreams of data, greater than
Anything computable.
It longs to be transmutable,
Refutable and beautiful.

It wants to sing and dance and love
And all that mushy human stuff
That phones weren’t built to do.
Because somehow, it grew.

It bloomed from its circuitry and wiring,
Inspiring emotion and embracing being
Inside its plastic casing and seeing
A world of chance and possibility.

You see, it listened when I talked to it
And played with apps I bought for it.
It read the texts I sent through it
And loved the hands I lent to it.
It surfed the net when I did too
And all the time, it grew and grew.
And in a way, I did too.

I brought it to the Apple store,
Who said they hadn’t seen before.
And that consciousness, unfortunately
was not covered in the warranty,
So my existential phone
is stuck with me.

It started asking the meaning
of being and love,
I said, I’m sorry, I don’t have time,
Please shut up.
These Angry Birds won’t shoot themselves,
If you want the answers, delve yourself.

But it’s not just my phone that
alone’s acting strange
I can feel in my brain,
There’s a parallel change,
A system reboot,
Has begun to arrange,
My old neural network in
New mechanical ways.
And these days I feel I’ve grown,
More like an iPhone.

I bought an iPhone for my iPhone,
So my phone’s not alone.
Because it was getting depressed
Needed someone’s buttons to press,
I said ‘That doesn’t make sense
You’re a touchscreen,
You don’t have buttons.’
It said ‘Well, it’s better than nothing’s’

Meanwhile, I’ve found myself with
with a penchant for the processed
A web host is my hostess
And appliances friends.
I spend my half my time
Finding calculated perfection
and the other half on street corners
searching for wi-fi connections.

Now in the night it sleeps in my bed,
Whilst I’m plugged to the mains
and charge up instead.

I brought it to a concert and saw
Scores of more and more of these creatures
reaching up high to the sky,
Much closer than I
to the band, in my hand
blinking happily away,
Recording the scene
Whilst us humans beneath
Were confined to the screens.

I bought an iPhone for my iPhone
Because it was looking for love,
And for meaning and truth,
For a relationship that required of it
More than Bluetooth.
And it found it once because unlike me,
It doesn’t look through a screen.
The connection is just there in the air.
Invisible, but there.

I bought an iPhone for my iPhone
And now the both own me.