TV man

He peoples poetry with the people he never met.

He might have found them but they fell into the space

between the table and the wall and when he looked again

someone had swept them away from under his feet and

they were already in the garbage bag on the corner.

He is a television man on the driest channels, he is only visible when

someone turns the knob and turns up the volume and summons him,

on Saturdays you see static, he appears in an office

in TV man clothes and a bow tie that matches right

and he works too rights and he laughs too loud but no one hears because

the volume is turned down.

Sometimes in crowds he gets nervous and he sweats because the laugh tracks

make him nervous. Sometimes, 

behind the ozone smell of static in the halfhouses that

TV men populate, he peoples his poetry

with the people he didn’t meet, but he only knows the wrong words

that he stole from history textbooks and office files and scripts and

children’s rhymes, he files them away in lines for another day so that he can

clearly cross-reference the contours of the flavorless syllables and measure the day

when the national audience demoted him to an extra and a flat face and voice

and five lines and a tie that gets shut off when the commercials come on and is

never seen in technicolor in the movies.

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