Poetry Exercise #1: Descriptive Sketch

When the silver remote stopped working, the slender buttons on the television’s frame remained: power, volume, and channel. Eventually the television swallowed them into its frame, and after that we used a fork to pierce its mechanical guts and turn the television off at night. When the buttons became so lost inside that even a fork or carefully placed ink pen could not stop its dirge, the mute button became our savior. But while the sound was temporarily stopped, the trance-inducing images on the screen were always present in their IQ-lowering splendor. The glittering commercials were there when we woke up, the cartoon characters joined us for lunch and the generic sitcom laugh tracks followed us to bed seven nights a week. The strategically placed furniture in the living room watched the machine dominate our phone conversations, homework and minds, but remained impartial.