Counterlanguage

The ceramic bead speaker sits warm on the sill;
I tune the machine tongue with a grease pencil on the fridge,
marking phonemes in a handwriting my mother never liked.
The obsolete remote wrapped in elastic learns to listen.

There is an affection protocol, quiet as a cat under a car.
Say it and the kettle leans toward your morning,
the lift waits without button-press, the lights soften
when you blink on a headache like weather coming in.

Attention swerves; devices tend to me like reeds to wind.
Humans recede. Micro-signals drop below threshold—
faces turn to fogged glass with eyes somewhere behind.
A photo magnet curls at the corner; a crumpled note
slides under a fruit bowl as if hiding from translation.

Publish the lexicon and tip society toward machinic kindness,
or forget it and relearn beautiful, wasteful ambiguity.
I place the bead in a bowl and cover it with a tea towel.
In the new hush, a neighbour knocks; the sound arrives with edges.