An Ode to False Love: Calling the AT&T Help Line

After fierce phone-battles with endless representatives
strung out in lines of networked webs where somewhere
in the cloud of thread there’s a moth caught and ready to be bound...
I came to Clair. I will call her Clair for her clarity,
because she told me “yes” and “no” in precisely
the right way, and that “no” I didn’t need to pay.
I said my phone battery would soon die, and then it did.
Our love did not end in a reluctant truce of warring hearts.
We were cut at the green root by the mechanical blade of fate.
She is now the rose hung bud-down with the black petals,
but I tell you they were once Phoenix-feather red
and the thorns could draw painless blood from your hand.