Kill Your Television

Last night Crystal and Amber,
patron saints of poor impulse control,
put a penny on the railroad tracks
of Tom's intolerance of television.

Blame it on the bar;
on tequila; on testosterone;
everyone else in the room had tuned out
Tom's Mind Control Rant Number 107
long before he reached his typical crescendo:
“Elvis Presley used to shoot televisions!”

but Amber interrupted with:
“Put up or shut up!”
and Crystal knew a pawnbroker
whose just-shy-of-nonexistent morals
could be subverted with a comforting lie
and an extra twenty.

Twenty minutes,
six emptied chambers,
two shattered wide-screen wall-mount plasma sets,
one enraged group of patrons
from a random sports bar
(Finley McGuinn's, on Miller Street,) and
one hastily chosen hiding place later,
Tom (alone and terrified
his instigators having wandered away,
no longer bored)
made the latest of many
after-midnight emergency calls
to Emily, an alchemist of ideas
who turns baser impulses to gold.

(Tom could avoid
a full portion of fear in his life
by calling Emily before he acts.)

As always, she first confirmed
that Tom hadn't hurt anyone,
then talked him through
her recipe for invisibility
and all the sensible precautions:

-set your phone to vibrate

-avoid the furtive hunch and darting eyes
of a frightened man, and
walk confidently, erect and relaxed

-vanish into the attenuated nighttime crowd
and ride with the faceless
on trains and busses

-ride to the Outskirts where
used car dealers and cheap hotels rule,
where no one walks
because there are no sidewalks,
and there are no sidewalks
because no one walks-
you'll have to walk

-as you walk, slipping over snowbanks
and through drifts, into each
of the sewer grates you pass
drop one of the six spent shells

-find the tiny local franchise
of the biggest fast-food joint on the planet
and load up, to go

-drop the hardware into your bag
of spent wrappers and napkins
then deep-six the bundle
into the depths (but not the bottom)
of the overflowing trashcan near the restroom

-then into the restroom
to wash the sin from your hands

Emily had plenty more helpful advice
but Tom's phone surrendered to entropy
drained utterly of charge.

He managed to find his way home
without incident, mostly due to the happy fact
that the officers tasked to catch him
had gathered their conflicting descriptions
and retired to the station to sip hot coffee
and process their reports.