I drop it at the bus stop, not drunk, I don’t think,
just cack-handed and carrying too much tat.
Face-down beside the kerb, it looks unbroken.
I could leave it there, like Schrödinger’s famous cat,
the damage quantum, both smashed and not-smashed.
Like the robin egg child-me found down at the rec,
blue and immaculate, couched in leaves and shredded trash.
I knelt, heart in mouth, beside my lunchbox and rucksack
to take it up, and back to a box of cotton wool to see it hatch
and (like in the books) to have a robin as my very own.
Here and now, I step into the road, dazed and detached,
the 38 blaring like a drunk as it rolls away to town.
Carefully, carefully. I lift the phone and flip it like an ace.
Another world collapses in my hands, and is erased.