Do Not Pick Up The Telephone by Ted Hughes

That plastic Buddha jars out a Karate screech

Before the soft words with their spores


The cosmetic breath of the gravestone

Death invented the phone it looks like the altar of death


Do not worship the telephone


It drags its worshippers into actual graves


With a variety of devices, through a variety of disguised voices

Sit godless when you hear the religious wail of the telephone

Do not think your house is a hide-out it is a telephone


Do not think you walk your own road, you walk down a telephone


Do not think you sleep in the hand of God you sleep in the mouthpiece of a telephone


Do not think your future is yours it waits upon a telephone


Do not think your thoughts are your own thoughts they are the toys of the telephone


Do not think these days are days they are the sacrificial priests of the telephone

The secret police of the telephone

0 phone get out of my house


You are a bad god


Go and whisper on some other pillow


Do not lift your snake head in my house


Do not bite any more beautiful people

You plastic crab


Why is your oracle always the same in the end?


What rake off for you from the cemeteries?

Your silences are as bad


When you are needed, dumb with the malice of the clairvoyant insane


The stars whisper together in your breathing


World’s emptiness oceans in your mouthpiece


Stupidly your string dangles into the abysses


Plastic you are then stone a broken box of letters


And you cannot utter


Lies or truth, only the evil one


Makes you tremble with sudden appetite to see somebody undone

Blackening electrical connections


To where death bleaches its crystals


You swell and you writhe


You open your Buddha gape


You screech at the root of the house

Do not pick up the detonator of the telephone


A flame from the last day will come lashing out of the telephone


A dead body will fall out of the telephone

Do not pick up the telephone