The TV knob was made of resin, its gold skirt
like a Kewpie doll’s, but it was gone.
So we changed the channel
with a pair of pliers (on the flat spot
on the spindle): chunk chunk
and then lo, Jerry Lewis. Chunk chunk and lo,
the marionettes with giant hands. The song went:
my heart would be a fireball. And in the chunking
and the singing and the watching, lo, my heart became one.
Less pageantry in the now. Say Sputnik: no other word
climbs my throat with such majestic flames.
Gone, the marionettes in flightsuits made of foil
gone grainy on the boob tube. The tremulous way
their bodies moved, my fear for their well-being.
The comic stupidity of the child,
which is forgiven. Unlike the stupidities to come.
The boy had a guinea pig named Fireball, so I taught him
the song by way of mourning
when it died. He still possessed his sweetness,
unlike older sons who think you are a moron without big
subwoofers in your car. To that son I say:
you may think you’re one of the alpha-carnivores
just because you’ve shot many avatars of whores
on a video screen that you will never have the Cuban missile crisis on;
you do not even really have the bomb, and how can anyone
command their cool without the bomb: Sam Cooke, James Dean,
those boys lived kitty-corner to their annihilation.
But my son glazes— what’s so special about the past
when everyone has one? And yours, he says,
is out of gas. Then vroom, he’s off—
you might think his car is breathing by the way the windows
bend. Welcome to the new world, Mom,
he says, if you hear singing, it ain’t a song.