Lost in Translation

I sit sprawled in a chair

holding the remote in my hand

the clicker – a ray gun, a magic wand

pointed at the flat screen,

flipping through stations, looking for a place to land.

It’s late and my attention span is short.

News Networks – left, right and somewhere in the middle

all pretty much the same.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

play their greatest hits – now – in one boxed set!

Conquest, War, Famine and Death,

Pestilence, Economic Collapse, Political Extremists, Suicide Bombers, Ecological Disaster, Civil Unrest, Revolution….

with special guests….

The Seven Deadly Sins,

entire networks devoted to each one,

but we won’t go there.

The Weather Channel –

Record-breaking drought, wild fires and floods,

global warming, earthquake in Virginia,

hurricane bearing down on the mid Atlantic coastline.

Does the world really need a remake of Conan the Barbarian?

Perhaps this really is a better place because of shows like

“Hillbilly Handfishin'” –  “Hoarders – Buried Alive”,

and “Transgendered and Pregnant.”

After all, who am I to judge?

Here’s a movie called “Thor’s Hammer”,

a tale about Vikings pitted against ferocious Werewolves.

The Vikings have Australian accents

and the werewolves are clearly actors

dressed up in really bad wolf suits.

Perhaps the bard who recited the Beowulf saga

in the Great Hall in front of a roaring fire

was telling some version of the same story,

but something got lost in translation

between that Anglo-Saxon epic

and this late night movie that went straight to video.

New research claims that a person’s lifespan

is shortened by 22 minutes for every hour of television

If this is the case,

I would have been dead

years ago.