TV Before and After the Watershed

Before - Watching with Mother

Draw the curtain against the day

to see the flickering light

make the shape of another world.

 

Mother sits on the scratchy settee,

upright, taut, alert,

children cross-legged on the floor,

the magic show begins –

 

Andy Pandy and Looby Loo

stare sweetly with fixed smiles,

and play nicely at empty games.

The Wooden Tops

are well behaved,

they tidy up and have tea,

Spotty Dog brings joy.

Bill and Ben are better,

they speak another language

the grown up voice pretends to know,

Little Weed, like a smiling mother,

sends them all to bed.

 

I hold my breath

for

Hoppity.

‘Such a naughty puppet’,

Mother says,

we watch together but what we see

is not the same for Hoppity

is best of all!

Oh Hoppity stay with me, Hoppity my love,

leave that horrible Sara girl,

live with me for ever more

 

and he has.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhUQgndBXGE

***

After - If you’d seen what I’d seen

Last night on TV, I saw a woman being made. Her hair was collected by a man who said it was an innocent pastime, hanging it from the roof of a cave in Turkey, growing it there in the dark over years. Still, stalactites of tresses.

Her veins were reined in on a table by a surgeon in London and her snatch was stitched so her husband would love her more.

Her hermaphroditic nature made it necessary to remake her ruined, childhood penis and her long, strong arm was fashioned in to a longer, stronger phallus. Her breasts were enlarged and reduced and sunburned and protected all at the same time.

Then she was perfect.

She drifted through a house filled with birds, collected by a man who loved the freedom they symbolised, but only wanted decorations. Porcelain, wood, plastic, cloth. Not bird shit and flesh.

In his neat temple of ornaments, in the bedroom he had no room to sleep in and the bathroom he had no room to bathe in, owls nested. On plates, on thimbles, on lamps and towels. Towel owls. Saucer eyed, vicious and compelling; the companions of Athena, the goddess of wisdom.

A created woman, her wisdom radiating from cable TV. A goddess on the discovery channel.

 

Domestic Detail in the House of Dreams