Television Hauntings

we grew out of the japanese box television we watched cartoons on as children on our adjacent beds which we would make pillow forts out of and become anything we wanted to be. many winters passed and it was replaced with a higher definition flat screen, its blinding vibrant colors and relentless fidelity on which we watch riot police and tear gas seep into the streets we lived in like typhoons falling trees and green bamboo apartment scaffolding, from distances too strange to be divined, but too distant to be lived. I remember sitting in a dying cafe watching the streets below me on the local news, the ghost clouds of tear gas entombing everything in sight: a man shot today, unidentifiable body bags tomorrow, a family in tears nobody will ever see. I change channels but there is nothing. no matter the television, crackling static will always live between, its spectral tendrils reach out of the screen and suffocate me. there is no gas mask to help me breathe.

summers in england

bruised

you would say,

in the hoarse rasping voice

one only has from years of smoking.

I remember the honey gold apples you grew

in your garden where

I learned how to hang bed sheets to dry,

and how to wash the 1972 Rover 3500.

You’d watch through the window,

glastonbury reverberating

on the box television.

I learned to listen

for the hushed shuffling of your slippers

on those crisp summer mornings

and the kettle whistling for a cuppa.

now I see,

through the midnight

navy tardis,

foggy dusk that crept in

through gaps in the windows

we had left ajar.

the chilling summer wind foreboding

what would come

and what wouldn’t.

I sift through

the abundance of faux fruit

in a labyrinth of fragments,

the glass jigsaw puzzle I lacked

patience to piece together.

If only I had seen the picture

in completion,

an hourglass housing sanguine sands,

each grain a falling moment.

You always knew

what my favorite chocolates were,

I wonder

if you still do

Alex is a writer from Hong Kong. His favorite fruits are strawberries and apples. He also enjoys pears, though not as much. The Narcissist by Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland is a great song.