Listening to your Voice at 2am

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though you say it’s 2.37, telling me what love is

(amidst the masturbation, sex toys, silly things)

I realise how long it would take for someone to tell me

if you died – if you ever lived.

And though your voice over a phone has always sounded strange to me,

I find now that I cannot imagine you speaking any other way.

Even pictures of you look strange,

a collection of someone else’s memories. Still,

listening on loop to your four-minute testimony,

fronted by apology, “Just want you to know I love you, that is all,

I’m going to go to sleep now it’s 2.41,” I think I know you were once real.

And I go to sleep too, the end of the ritual.