TeeVee Daze

For all of you Moms out there (mostly Moms), who bring your young children to a modern public Library to take advantage of joyful and mind-stretching books and programs, the Anonymous Poet has heard your silent sighs of respite from TeeVee and iPhone. He remembers the TeeVee devil, too, here captured by the youngest of three sons.

<indent><indent><indent>Supposed</indent></indent></indent>

Tucked in the far corner room 'a where we live A Mom's not able to peek across a main hallway, <indent>'n shadows dark the windows facing west,</indent> From a sugar maple tree; it's where we play <indent><indent><indent><indent><indent>we three,</indent></indent></indent></indent></indent> Where we go to stare the life <indent><indent><indent>from an old teevee:</indent></indent></indent> Me 'n a little red Carrot cub, <indent>'n Henry all wrapped in Tweety's hug,</indent> A forever unzipped yellow bird Leaking stuffin' balls on Mom's clean rug, <indent>marking the telltale path by which he came;</indent> Near grown-up Jay has Koko on a special chair, Bear who's just a shadow of his old stuffed self, But it's me anyway who always brings him there. My on'y Carrot, he's supposed to always heed The urgent whimperin' plea of real live doggy, <indent>'n walk her even when it's cold with rain,</indent> No mind the stuffin' gets so awful smelly soggy; Tweety's not supposed to move, nor leak at all, So it's Koko's job to fetch and make the leash, To open up the outside door, Which tiny little Carrot can hardly even reach. Though not one of the rest 'a us <indent><indent>is even slightly Tweety-leaky,</indent></indent> We never ever supposed to move at all, <indent>'cause in the way we watch teevee shows</indent> We're not supposed to hear our doggy call.

By the Anonymous Poet

That was entertainment and distraction away from the world of adults before the advent of pocket phones and their portability. Did these three TeeVee-age kids grow up to be avid readers of books and literature anyway? Our Poet says not so much. They do not now go to public Libraries. They do not even listen to radio, the miracle technological distraction of Poet’s earliest memories (told in WWII context in “All the Light We Cannot See” [2014] by Anthony Doerr). They all have iPhones now. Dazed in one way or the other, and all the light we cannot see indeed!