The Static Breed

Whatever the world around us lacked

was more than made up for on the screen,

those bright mornings we lay sprawled beneath its beam

once upon a living room rug.

That game of follow the leader always had us spinning

in its splitting spell for a thousand summer hours,

bound up by the ears in a million commercial jingles

once we’d had our drug.

They say that glow box made us "slow"

but the ADD sure gave me get up and go!

It taught me trippy and brought my brain sticky to its sex

when I was slouching like a slug.

It taught me rad, made good look bad, and jokes were had

at mom and dad, the birds and bees, B's and G's,

the toys for each who flirts or hurts or rules or drools—

and no one pulled the plug.

NEXT

--Poems from the Sprawl