Television's like a goldfish bowl, like the friend that won't shut up, won't listen to your side of the discussion, it's got a train of thought running, it doesn't slow down, it doesn't hit stations you jump, jump onto a patch of ground when an advert comes on, you hit the ground running, piss or shit, make the coffee, find the choclate biscuits mum hid in the same spot they went missing from last week, you're inebrious, you're sober, you're bored and famished, the argument's still seething, alone in the corner, it's losing, losing to ignorance, losing to choice, losing to the flick of a switch, lost all sign of life.

Television's like a panacea for loneliness, it's on and noisy, and it's music, or it's the replay of the football, and your back's truned, head's down, fingers around a pen to a page, or hammering on those keys of another screen that shines silent but bright, ticking the seconds away in the "Right-side-top", this screen suffering your pride, the screen at your back priding itself on your acceptance, your total belief, your idolisation, get down on knees and face the cathode Mecca, "Channel 9", "Channel 7", "ABC, ABC", like a mantra, glowing Gods so colourful, so pure, so indestructible, Captain Scarletts by the score, talking heads in artificial triple haloes, voicing like shadows the language of the wholesome.

Television's like a telescope to another world dwelling in mirrored nescience of you curled up in blankets and hope, insight dawning by the second, of Kakadu, the Blue Danube, Riverdancing to the tune of info-tainment, celebrities sprouting, burning in fake flames then dying the death in a change of contract, a change in diet, a change in hairstyle or camera angle, hunting pieces for the cutting-room floor, green-room scenes, back-stage passes, late-night swearing brawlers, non-thinking drunken slurrers, "BOY", like it's out of focus or smeared with grease to becloud the edges, to screen the real, all made-up,chimera after chimera, piles of foundation on which to paint "Such a pretty face", opted for at random and sucked so far up to the lens it could be obsession, it could be a slide under the microscope, bacteria purling, amoeba swarmimg, two solids pressed so fixedly together how could anything survive?

Television's like a good place to hide, the world's oppression pets the windows and walls, poverty stirs up the dirt in the pantry, paranoia strolls the streets on the hunt for another victim, or to launch itself as saviour number 5 calls "Come to life", "Come to your senses", a consensus, shared opinions, a cabal en-masse, debating, questioning, "Why, what, who and where?", "What for?", reasons become irrelevant, goals forgotten, rabid fanaticism, the works of darkness, Princes falling foul of the Republic, philosophy borrowed over a season, Winter boring down, pneumatic-clutch drilling on in marathon, no Paris to savour from high on a parapet, no spouting tongue of drowning flame, no gentle cat stroking it's back and sides around calves, no refugees in need of sanctuary.

Television's like a dog that doesn't need exercising, doesn't neeed food or water, doesn't need the backyard cleared of daily reminders, strung all over like "Mad Woman's Shit", slung on the laundry line, feline telepath disclosing all, massive disruptions in domestic beatitude explainable in the early hours over comfort in satin-black, bolstered, bloody-eyed aand impoverished, the years to come too long to wait, parents and siblings doing nothing for something together, wicker-work fraying, scarring, secreting a cache beneath the boards, morning glory a barricade to idle voyeurs, pre-mature mourning, solace poised patiently on a front verandah pining for re-admittance, guilt free, innocent, satiated wanderlust, a brief re-aquaintance with the "Old" neighbourhood, palpating, smiling, screening the piercing with shade, early afternoon through the evening, into the darkets hours, collaposing, spent, exhaustion clawing at rasping lungs, limbs taut and strained, liquefied, coated in a film of sheer ecstacy.

Television's like a Lady on the train detoured from Melbourne with luck in a pair of 21 spotted cubes on her bicep rolling with the times, shrugging off just a vestige of the lack of an introduction, drinking "pots", Bear screaming the "Anti Sex" message, aliens pitched at the tether, palming bravado, silent and suffering the Winter's chill, a momento to take home, brief notes in rhyme of love in a saucer with change in a cafe near-forgotten, transposed and duplicated, saved for the Treasury, spying glasses of school-boy dreams, lace and pubic-forest, a girl called Sharon who wouldn't come over, but sat and sat and laughed as heads asleep lolled and bounced, early afternon napping commuters with no control, spring-neck dogs from the back-windows of suburban limousines, gone on holidays, hung-over and vomitting, out at sea pitching up berley.

Television's like the missive you just wrote, it sits addressed, sealed down with some fine red wax and the crafted end of the Royal stamp to impress approval onto the envelope it could appear considerable, like a Magna Carta for the individual, the law of the lay between just you and the reader, to be sild into the communication machine and delivered post-haste, whilst unknowing tickled your bowels with fear of over-stepping yet again, of foisting too hard, opining too little of too much, or too much of an entity so paltry that only delusion might magnify it to be anything at all, time spent in company like a convenience, when convenient, otherwise forgotten, sporadic feeling for that something that was but isn't, that could be an age you were at, a well documented phase, passing, so slowly passing, incessant indecision, the choice never yours, consumerism based supply and demand, drinking it down, drinking it down like cheap wine, solitary wetting spreading to all horizons senses reeling.

Television's like an ingeminate performance, a memory coursing back into mind without cause or justification, it's averted, it's colour, it's black and white, it won't be gone, it gets to the curve before the lights on an unfinished freeway wrestling the wheel away from destruction, above the forest of refineries burning the the night to cinders, a hole in the sky a nice place to park, to take in the view, hits the barricade panting hard, taking to the lonely side of the street, visible, mobile, unexpected appearances for days on end, miraculous, sleight of hand, accessorised by dreams, baring twin souls, Achilles heel a birthmark above Mother's tread, circuitous gait of protection, spitting Holy water, tonic water, Devil's advocates at the dinner-table offering poison, the Beast's number tattooed on a bald pate, hallucination, Lucifer's effigy prone on a sea-weed compost, protected by love from needle-fine phallic aspirations, gone with the throw of a shroud, doors lockd, body securely harnessed against pain, sympathy, understanding, an addicts cry for help.

Television's like unplayed music in a head dancing limbs in spontaneous expression, curing ills, curare voices beamed via satellite, sat on shelves coated in beetle-back-shellac, metamorphosis only the family knows, bearing up to the ordeal at hand, stand trial, stand bare, stand on a stret corner and "Sing like a motherfucker!!", spruik for the whore of being eking deliberately toward just enough, she crawls to you, hands and knees bloodied, lacerated near to shreds, passages of broken glass, tooth and nail, fiction and fact, flaying the exposure, wiping away the residue to crystal clean, once, twice, three times to be beside, stooping, smiling, silver shining in beautification, amnesia befalling a world, word of mouth the new publicity, traversing the heavens, guiding stars for more wise men navigating global tours, loading cases for brief sojourns, VIP service, door to door, five star, devoid of patrimony, solo, slamming a big thirst near to death, submission hold "For you baby", devotion in solution.

Television's like a cramp in the calf, a bout of Delerium Tremens hours too soon, lugging a nicotine spike from a packet to lips, flaring the trachea, filling lungs with instant sedation, hungering clarity in xylophone hips and ribs, doleful eyes, spouse waiting, tendering expenditure, surviving on kind, in debt to favour after favour, grappling at tomes of blank verse, narrating, stroking, pausing, succumbing to mesmerism, spinning rotors on lounge-room ceilings splintering the hopes of hollow doughboys ugly in demise, so pretty to watch, Christians to the starving lions, unarmed children attempting to defend themselves against Mongol hordes, no man inside their Chinese wall, the Eastern-comfort cooked up neat riding ribbons of the circulatory to oblivion, exhorting the purge through pores and the eye of a cock some self-abuse, indiscriminate bastardisation, like journalism, victimisation, find a target, so easy, so alone, so much like shooting fish, they vault above a wave, extend wings, clay pigeons to hair trigger shot-guns intoning the need of colours to remain seperated by the panel of white, incandescence flashing, closing eyes for but an instanty in Heaven