Submitted For Your Approval
Submitted for your approval:
A man deprived of
all the childhood trauma he feels he
justly deserved.
A man who feels there should have been
a higher quotient of horror content
in those formative years of his youth.
More running with scissors and less
“Hey! Who wants ice cream?!”
Less “Let me kiss it and make it better.”
Less puppy-dog tails,
if you all get my anti-wag meaning.

Oh, he remembers monkeys.
Yes, and not just run of the mill,
throw poop on ya monkeys, but
flying monkeys.
Airborn chimps that ripped the arms off Ray Bolger.
Yanked all the stuffing outta poor ol’ Ray
and spread it all over the forest.
And there… There was Ray,
still alive and babbling incoherent,
with a good portion of his insides
lying there on the outside.
You must admit that for a young boy,
seeing a severely gutted scarecrow
was the epitome of full Freudian freak-out.

But he weathered it.
And though he and his sister were forced to
hide trembling behind a chair
every time “W.W.W.” showed up on the screen…
(Um…for those of you unenlightened,
that’s the Wicked Witch of the West).
Yes, though they weathered “Triple W”
and survived to tell the tale…
Damn it!
There shoulda been more horror.

Submitted for your approval:
Rod Serling scared the bejeesus outta my mother.
He would not let her go to sleep at night.
Okay. All you Baby Boomers out there
know who I’m talking about.
You young pups likely think my mom had some dude
ticking on the far side of the glass,
trying to get in.
Not too far from the truth when you realize that
that glass was a TV tube with
clock and pendulum floating through
deep space there on the other side.
Or a big white door or window.
Perhaps E=MC squared or
a multi-jointed doll.

Or worse yet:
A doll’s eye floating there in the cosmos.
A single ocular orb
complete with droopy eyelid.
The most absolute of
sphincter puckering horror.
Scared shitless?
You bet.
Course, it could be that
I simply came to associate that eyeball
with the dread of what Rod Serling
had in store for me.

Sorta like when you see a triangular fin
slicing through the water
and your babbling inner Id screams
“Shark! Mommy porkin’ shark!”
Sorta like when the girl you’re dating
pauses in front of a maternity shop
and lingers
a little
too long.
You know.
Horrific stuff like that.

That plastic Cyclops oozing across
the dark backdrop of our television set
gave me a topsy turvey tum tum.
But… Not for long.
My mumzy came to find that
those nights Twilight Zone aired
were also nights that her children
failed to embrace the deep realm of slumber.
Oh, not only us.
Mr. Serling’s creations also haunted her pillow.

Submitted for your approval:
One young boy who got all that cerebro-horror
mainlined into his brain vein, and then
was made to go cold turkey.
No Twilight Zone.
No Outer Limits.
No Captain Kangeroo.
(Okay. Captain Kangeroo wasn’t so scary but,
Mister Green Jeans was most certainly a serial killer).

So yea. You don’t think that
that sudden withdrawal from the T. Zone
didn’t scar my noggin a bit?
No long term tele-tattoo trauma
to my tinker toy top-hat?

Week after week after week, I
stand here before you
pouring my cuisinart processed cerebellum
through this meta-morphine microphone
and out to your word junky ear holes.

Submitted for your dis-approval:
Can you stand the fix, or
is this serial syringe
a tad too toxic?

©06 Jack Hubbell