The Immoral Maze

I was among the first generation
for whom television was their childminder,
whilst our parents' attention span
was daily used up by domestic machinery.

I am not proud about this, it is just a fact.
That I was guided towards it by people
who were illiterate about how it worked
was one of many hurdles I had to negotiate,
along with their emotional illiteracy.

That I had/have to negotiate those hurdles
is something I was often painfully unaware of.

Never was this clearer
than when we were all forced
to watch the television wrestling
whilst we had our Saturday night fry.

Dad was drunk and insisted on the wrestling
because it was the loudest metaphor
for a hangover that humanly possible.

He was bad at pretending he was sober,
so we had to be better at pretending then he was
and better at being forgiving too.

Every week he left the table early
and gave the cat his expensive steak.
This is the cat he always played rough with
until it flex it claws and drew dad's blood.

There was no way out of these routines,
no way, safe or unsafe, of escaping.
The more we watched the more toxic the wrestling became,
until I felt caught in some unending internal conflict
that even now-forty years on-remains.

Nowadays I avoid television to escape false competition
and still competitions, both false and deadly serious, follow me.