Normal Wear

The assessor circles *customer damage*
on the form and hands back the phone.

Of course. Look at it:
a corner scabbed pale where tar met glass,
the charging port packed with red dust,
one thin crack travelling north-east
as if the screen had tried to remember lightning.

Inside, the battery keeps its bad habits:
ninety, twenty, five, black.
It has learned the grammar of leaving
and returning with no apology.

There is sand from some beach
I forgot to enjoy.
There is flour in the volume button.
There is a taxi rank archived as grit
beneath the cover, a bead of rain
dried over the lens so every photo
since then carries one soft planet.

The showroom asks for nothing to have happened.
Its objects sleep in their own weather,
wrapped, serialled, righteous,
all promise and no fingerprints.

But the things I trust are ruined accurately:
the pan black where heat kept faith,
the kettle furred with its private limestone,
the boot heel planed down
by one stubborn route home.

By dusk the glass remembers me
better than I do. I find the warm square
where my thumb has worried one name
into a small, transparent bruise.

So write it up: warranty void.
Say the seal was broken.
Say the case was opened in rain.
Say the owner ignored warnings,
crossed low streets, answered calls,
spent the charge down to its last red animal.

And when I fail, let it be this way:
not boxed, not immaculate,
but with the image already gone
and still a little heat on the glass,
a trace no cloth can clear
without becoming part of it.