the televisual visual

it takes three remote controls

to turn your cheap Kogen TV

from standby to on –  three!

then when all lights are green

an ossified screenshot of the last piece

of drivel you watched is, for the briefest of moments,

still  blazoned to the LCD screen

by the digital set top box –

a kitchen that’s more of an

Ikea-decorated gymnasium

with an oven and deep fat fryer –

could be Master Chef but then

it could be Iron or Naked or Surprise –

before it’s usurped by the grainy footage

of a Syrian fire fight and children

in soldier’s garb in Palestine

kissing this or that dignitary

cleric, getting rubbed up

by the cone of salt and pepper

sprouted on his face, rubber

AK 47s flapping like windsocks

at country airfields, or the limbs of effigies

aerated and flailing outside caryards –

then a glimpse of unbridled chaos

on Wall Street,

then another street

of caricatures

mad people

foreclosed houses –

that’s when you realise the volume’s down –

there’s a fourth remote for that –

two AA batteries in its coverless back –

cover probably tucked

covertly between couch cushions

with lint and almonds

and oats and five cent pieces

so old they’ve gone green –

and the spider-vein cracked covers

of the other three – you’re on a couch

that’s draped in a white bed sheet

a big cotton prophylactic

and pillows with Asian embroidery –

ochre roses on the couch’s

grandmotherly upholstery

show dimly through the areas

clinging tightest to the fabric – arms

like a stockinged woman’s arse cheeks

and the volume’s at a hundred

but still the speakers

are dumbly silent –

Cathy Freeman’s being interviewed

in a Coles supermarket

and you’re upset you can’t hear

because all that remains is to look at her

and to look, for you, is to sexualise

and to sexualise is to be too much

of a human being for this lounge room

more suited to an empty old mansion

in which a toilet hasn’t flushed

for longer than your measly life

than a cheaply finished townhouse

sprayed with the luxury brand of shellac –

masking tape mortar

suits with squiggly pinstripes –

now the newsreader’s back on air

and the volume, as it happened

needed to be jacked on the box

as well as the TV – and his hair

and airbrushing lend a youthfulness

that the oaky voice turns away

and his brown eyes gaze askance

at the teleprompter –

woman at his side

twenty years younger and Pilipino –

you rebuke yourself for thinking

of mail-order brides –

then the clitoris, omnipresent

dancing, lit from within

by a roseate light whose bulb

you can see inside, the body

of the bearer absent

from that thought but not from them all –

a story about space comes on –

on the speckled black screen

you see your lower torso

then slouch to the wing-like collarbone –

pretty soon the face you hate

overlays the Helix Nebula

and the four remotes on your knees

have slid to the polished floor

without a sound – your crook nose

crooker in that vastness, that humungous

example of curvature – your sclera pale

your irises grey, and hair that seems the fountainhead

of all hair – how young you are

but how much older than before

and before that – certain cells as dead

as certain stars still sparkling

on that greatest of all echoes

unfathomable as the way

that face moves at your directive –

then a NASA lab explodes onto your retinas

and the reflection is gone – you bend down, crying,

to pick the remotes up, and when again you look

the letters on the screen spell seven billion stories

and something else – the feature film that starts

is an avant-garde one from Egypt

about suicide and fruit-eating –

a film so quiet, even the Metro Goldwyn Mayer

lion’s roar’s been sent to sound byte heaven.