She turned to me and said
I just don’t get TV
Having grown up
In the jungles of Borneo
With my Peace Corps parents
And stern English nanny
And the treasured books
That I (re)read
By candlelight.

Shhhhhh! I warned her,
As the commercial blared
They’ll hear you.
But she didn’t know
That the Nielsen ears were listening
And the knock at the door
Wasn’t the pizza man
After all.

They took her away
To a gray room filled with light
from a rounded screen.
And made her watch
Gray images of the modern farmer
It was all that was on at 5am,
And grotesquely cheerful shows
with freckled puppets.
So that her dreams
Would-be haunted places
Where Timmy is still down in the well
While Lassie scratches
At the door.

And they kept her up late at night
To watch, unblinking,
An endless parade of badly
Dressed aliens and monsters
And creatures from the dark
Shambling through the bleary late show hours
Their story lines infused
With the watcher’s own desperate
Exhaustion.

In the morning they moved her
into a sunny room with
Yellow walls and a color Zenith.
They gave her the first remote
(the ultrasonic space commander)
And showed her stories about
A talking horse, or car, or ghosts
That wouldn’t leave the house
And that girl in the bottle
Poor Major Nelson. Really?
And after a while she learned to twitch
Her nose, but could never tell
The two Darrins
Apart.

In time they returned her to me,
But she was hardly the same.
Lost in the marathon commercial break
Before the big reveal.