Video Monitoring Service (3)

on those rare occasions

you slum it in TV

or perhaps use football as an excuse

to check out some advertisements,

you notice how the cell phone

appears in so many

(even more than the car

and of course they appear together)

and hardly ever as a merely functional device

but bathed in an aura of wonder

the cell gets more close ups

than hands ever did

(except maybe for ivory soap

or “you’re soaking in it”)

and much more like cigarettes

back in the day, prosthetic

the cell appears like fingers

the center, the prop, the star—

& I don’t just mean the obvious ones

like the one for I think Cisco

in which an oh so civilized man

s(eemingly with a British accent)

is pictured in front of a river scene

with a raft (perhaps in Africa)

brags about how its APPS

can bring water to poor people

(who may have had better water

precisely to the extent they’re

less developed)

but also the adds selling cars

or food or insurance or soda

(if not yet the US army)

or banks---

pushing paperless

with its grim futurism

or the guy who won’t even answer

the urgent beeps of his cell

coz he’d have to put down his McNuggets.

the romance of seeing “Marry Me”

on a electric football scoreboard in your cell.

ah, to see the cell as the sell,

the hard sell disguised as soft sell

the luxuries sold as necessities-

the kind of progress that caused

the Kogi to come down from the mountains

in the 1980s to try to teach the Euro-Culture

to stop destroying the planet…

The sadness I feel when I see

in the younger actors smile

the same overcompensated smiles over their cells

that I see in the older actors' smile

after seeing their doctors about Cialis, etc

both with the same cheesy music

I once got paid to make (for a bank commercial).

or, worse, Journey’s “Anyway You Want It”

and yes an ad for facebook

showing a silly woman

obsessed with faking a smile for a selfie

while Wells Fargo spends more

to spin its image like BP did

after the Gusher In The Gulf

the movie Deep Water Horizon

was designed to hide….

(by the way, the Raiders won

--in overtime---and broke

the NFL record for most penalties ever in a game)

10-30-16