I recall writing checks in my spidery crawl.
The TV then was a humming spaceship
with glowing innards that deep-scanned
all who glued their flickering, bug-eyed minds to it;
it abducted whole families at a time.
That same television
materialized microwaves as heavy as lead ingots
replacing bread bins
while ushering in decades of TV dinners.
“Radio Shack’ and “Block Busters’ were thriving
The short brutal war between Betamax and VHS
was long over.
Cars had not yet learned to speak.
Many men thought that learning to type
would be a waste of their valuable time.
We had to go out to get stuff.
Fish in fish tanks
were considered adult entertainment.
The long married kept their sex life
hid like a ‘sixteen millimeter’ movie
projected onto the back of their brains.
Camera film had to be sent away
to be often irretrievably lost.
The food pyramid was thought to be
the right way up – we were already fat-heads.
We trusted the nightly news.
Then the Net captured us,
we found we had many hidden talents,
some even discovered how to wriggle their ears
and both at the same time!
Many years after leaving London
I return to the city
it is still dreaming of better days.
I am burdened with landscaped memories,
recordings taken with out-of-date electronics;
one is a Betamax video player,
the other by a VHS machine, next a DVD
that has no space for recollections.
An elderly Vauxhall Astra follows me
like an ever faithful dog.
The metropolis
is built on the brick-dust of era’s,
The young look dazed,
as if worm-holes in the River Thames
had closed
leaving them stranded here.
I imagine that nightly,
an older populace hang upside-down
from bell-tower rafters
to dream of Imperial Lions.
I have recorded the trip
on that clunky Betamax;
only I have the arcane skills
to operate it.
Back in Ohio
I store London in its original box,
then make my way downstairs
to photograph my wife
with a once brand new
polaroid camera.
Oh the mighty Titanic,
Unsinkable, so they say
And how about the Spruce Goose
So majestic yet such a waste
We were regaled with Hubble
The advance of our century they said
Of course they also said New Coke
Was the advance of the last century
Remember the Edsel, oh how it was hailed
And that tower in Pisa was a marvel
I was one of the few to buy a Betamax
And I cried as I watched the Challenger one morn
Waterworld was hailed but was only over budget
And I’m afraid my life is just another failure
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