As If I Didn’t Already Know
Hiding
indoors from a roasting afternoon,
I
am wrestling the internet.
It
is not submitting, and I’m about to
slam
the router into something hard and
unyielding;
a wall, perhaps the floor.
The
Virgin Media outages map I squint at
on
my phone is a consolation of sorts.
I
am not alone, but I am sitting
on
a wooden stool, lonely
in
this ring of frustration.
It
is no help when the engineer,
sweating
over wires two doors down,
tells
me this bout will last
another
hour, maybe more,
and
none when I find him a week later,
crouched
over a junction box
two
streets away, shaking his head,
complaining
how ropey the network
is
in my neighbourhood.