Everyone has a multiplicity of phones; iPhones, Androids and various devices of similar description, all capable of receiving email and text messages and connection to the internet as well as the ancient and fast disappearing cultural rite of actually speaking to another human being. How many phones does a man need? I have been a phone all my life. An Anglophone. Had I been born two thousand years ago in Britain I might have been a Saxonphone, baritone one hopes. Had I been an All-Pro tight end and coach of the Bears I might have been, by the merest transposition of two letters, a Diktaphone. Had I been an English teacher I could have been a grammarphone. Which is why, for my entire life, I have found it easy to phone it in.

The number of the phones I need
Is difficult to tell
Confined for life like Mr. Bede
In my small monkish cell
I get my emails one by one
Slipped underneath my door
I read them when the day is done
Just like the day before
I have a phone there on the wall
It rings or so they say
For I so seldom get a call
Yet still my bill I pay
Some yearn for the past simpler life
Without cell phones and such
Where man could live without much strife
In his poor phoneless hutch