Reply #2: Okay, this is an old one, but it was supposed to be "serious." Mock away. [View All]

"Behind the Screen"

A million ants are trapped on a beach inside your set,
said the girl on my first-grade playground
after I asked why t.v. channels blurred with snow.
For years I half-believed her, but needed proof,
staring each night until a station succumbed to scratchiness,
then craning close to decipher their dance.
Is it any wonder Carol Ann heard voices there,
searched for spirits in the flicker and hiss,
flattened hand to glass and got trapped in the void?
Once, I saw a man tell Jerry Springer
its snow showed him his dead mother,
her brother, relatives he did not remember,
surfacing out of static to prophecy the end of the world.
Surely, parts of it live,
can work a silicon sorcery,
are worthy of the ankles I sprained
striving to fly like Wonder Woman,
the fingertips stained
wanting to flick cigarettes like Sharon Stone.
They claim it is the reason
I never mastered multiplication tables,
that I doze beside it because
the drone lulls brainwaves lower than deep sleep.
They say a beast writhes beneath its broadcasts:
a creature whose secret center
must be censored or severed,
forgetting we plug it in with our own hands.