Little House on the Prairie

It’s almost fraud, the way they sold the show:
Opening theme ringing with triumphant notes,
credits hung on sunlit meadows, winning smiles
on the perfect faces of Ma and Pa, aglow with hope.

Ten minutes in, most hopes will be dashed—
added to a vast catalog of broken frontier dreams.
As soon as their first little house was Kansas-built,
prairie fire lit the barn and singed the cow.

Then all had to be abandoned. Osage Indians
and the US Government moved the territory line,
making the family nomads again. All else, 
given time, would also come to naught,

or bare survival. Wind storms and draughts,
scarlet fever making Mary blind, smoking boys
burn a school and kill a little sister, and just when 
a rich man says he’ll pay for reconstruction,

that rich man dies, revealing nothing but debt.
A drug-addicted soldier dies disappointing his ma.
Taxes and liens take the happy immigrant’s farm.
Old crook swindles Walnut Grovers out of savings.

For a new plow, Pa puts the oxen up for collateral,
then breaks his ribs before he can finish the work
that wins the plow… and if Caroline can forge 
her way to town with eggs and dignity intact,

then she must face Mrs Oleson’s withering words
and snotty, peppermint-wielding children.
Nelly Oleson’s bonnet-and-sneer alone could send 
anyone to the edge of ill will. But life’s snarls

can be combed out by a kind word from Charles,
and nary a falseness can stand up to his fiddle.
Barns burn on the righteous and the cruel alike,
and Minnesota blizzards make more orphans.

Mr Edwards fell on drunken, dark days
after smallpox killed his wife and daughter, 
but he dumped his resentment of an uncaring God
for the chance to sit by a widow in church.

Just when you thought it was safe to smile
at the lifelong struggle of Harriet and Nels
over haughty pettiness vs human decency,
here comes Caroline’s false pregnancy,

Albert’s morphine addiction, the abandonment
of the town, and old man Hansen’s stroke
leaving him broken and lost in total darkness.
Inevitably, they dynamite the whole town.

Then as if to yank us all away from the smorgasbord
of misery and mortality we’ve been served,
every episode wraps with the cheeriest tune
as Laura and her sisters tumble down a slope

of eternal wildflowers, as if entering Elysium
through a cosmic meadow of blossoming joy.


Gilligan’s Island

Skipper beating Gilligan––for stupidity––with his hat.
Gilligan running from a gorilla, sped-up film 
yanking synapses with comic amphetamine pacing.
Ginger’s overstated glamour, somehow maintained
by undying makeup and wardrobe, and framed
against Mary Ann’s cozy girl-next-door-ness.
The transparent pomposity of Thurston Howell III,
his wife, their hard-wired loyalty to their social status
even in the absence of market forces—
always gnawing the bone of economic destiny…
that was the joke, of course.
And the Professor—doomed to keep inventing
medieval doohickeys from coconut shells and bamboo
while invoking Faraday and Einstein––
couldn’t fix a boat and invented the Frisbee too late.

Gilligan’s Island was the nitwit grandfather of Lost.
People ripped from their lives by weather, by forces
beyond human control, but always lured into thinking
they could claw their way back to life’s steering wheel,
only to find that life has no such interface:
The tiny ship was tossed, 
and the island on Lost
could be relocated—
perhaps re-fated—
with, yes: a giant subterranean captain’s wheel pinned 
in bedrock, grinding stubbornly not in space but time,
twisting every castaway’s lifeline into a Gordian knot.

Russell Johnson, before Gilligan’s Island was filmed
on a beach in Hawaii, had been a WW2 bombardier—
shot down by the Japanese in the Philippines,
breaking both ankles, his co-pilot killed,
in a war that bloodied continents and led somehow
to the same man being awarded a Purple Heart
and someday returning to the Pacific Theater 
to play a child’s idea of a science genius in an epic farce
where surfers, robots, gorillas and sailors
all vie for the attention of Ginger and Mary Ann,
in the silliest rough draft of postmodernism, which is to say, 
life.

Ye Olde Blogspot, neglected lo these many years (10), still exists! Also, the counter I left ticking claims over 169,000 page views, so I feel like I ought to feed it again and see if it grows... like sourdough, like baby lizards, like gross extrusions from a Play-Doh fun factory.

So, until my attention span craps out again, I will collect the poems from my burgeoning bookling, Raised By TV. 

Looney Tunes

We watch the beatings Sylvester takes
from Granny’s umbrella, from a bowling ball
downspouted down his gullet
and into his now bulbous abdomen;
the anvils, bombs, and boulders
inflicted on Wile E. Coyote by himself;
the backfiring cannons that blacken
Yosemite Sam’s mad mug, and his militaristic
malfeasance blowing back on him
by way of his underpants—bulging diaper-like—
loaded with black powder sifting out of course
in a perfect trail, an unbroken fuse
from match to horizon, to a hiding place
among powder kegs itching to blow.
And that hunted, haunted anti-Buddha,
Daffy Duck, whose Thanatos complex bloats
with every shot, realigning his bill
after each shotgun blast, scorched but self-restoring,
made pure by bitter outrage, crying foul,
spouting verses of versus on a rise of spittle,
his faith in humanity always smithereened.

At what age did we learn such injuries
translated into real life—our bodies—
are unendurable? That heads made flat
move us beyond dizzy stars and black curtains,
that the hilarious noise of accordion legs
is quite unlike the sound of shattered femurs? 
Like Elmer Fudd resigned to his place 
as an outdoorsman in an eternal hunting season, 
I load the DVD for my daughter.

Because no one can give her a world 
without violence, we give her this one.
With her little wooden carrot, she points
and jabbers like Bugs as the first elastic note
of the Warner theme bends space and time
ahead of the changes to come.