I thank you, Sci-Fi Channel of my youth.
You helped a bookish farm boy cope with life:
your fantasy, my weird reality.
My neighbor’s backyard turkeys saw me step
off of the bus and chased me up the lane.
One time they knocked me down and flogged my face.
Somehow it terrified me less to think
these birds were pods that evil aliens
controlled. They aimed to claim a human host.
Much to my mom’s chagrin you had possessed
the groaning dish between our house and barn.
You manifested out of Ouija static
on our TV screen, a wholesome home
disturbed a favorite plot device of yours.
You were a poltergeist of programming:
Swamp Thing, Dark Shadows, Lost in Space, Space Ghost,
George R.R. Martin’s Beauty and the Beast,
the old school Battlestar Galactica.
You never took yourself too seriously,
your robots rummaged from a hardware store,
your powdered vampires, plastic skeletons.
But you still gave me chills enough to look
over my shoulder walking past the patch
of weedy gourds where Pumpkinhead might lurk.
One time my rubber boots slurped down into
manure where barnyard concrete stopped and slop
began. The suction wouldn’t let me go.
Imagining a quicksand backstory,
the hero (me) lunged forward, fell face first.
My father came around the barn in time
to see Swamp Thing rise slowly from the muck.