Stone Soup Servings is a regular series for Oddball Magazine that features upcoming performers at Stone Soup Poetry, the long-running spoken word venue in the Boston area that has partnered with Oddball Magazine. Stone Soup Poetry now meets from 7-9 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery’s new location at 541 Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square Cambridge, Massachusetts. The open mike sign-up at 6:30 p.m.

On March 21, we give open micer Surat Lozowick his due by way of a full feature. We offer the poem below as a teaser and hope you will be in the audience this Monday.

 

TV Will Eat You

TV will eat you,
like ants on a carcass whose heart still beats.
Turn pieces of you into pixels.
A dot the color the TV signal tells you to be.
TV will turn you from your soul’s growth
to its stories. Eat your attention like popcorn.
Silence your song for a sing-along.

TV will eat you.
Eat your mind, turn 24 hours into a couple presses of play,
pause, play, play, play.
TV will eat you like a dog licking peanut butter from your brain.
TV will eat you piece by piece,
slowly, so you don’t realize what you’re trading away for each episode.
TV will eat you and shit you out on the couch as more TV
and eat you again.

TV taste will make you forget you’re eating, make every meal a snack,
while TV keeps eating you for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and in between.

TV will eat your days off.
TV will eat your inspiration, eat your conviction, eat your resolve.
TV wants to sell your soul for a couple stories.
Sell your own story for someone else’s fairytales.
TV will tell you the same stories again and again
and pretend they’re new.

TV takes time and turns it into distraction.
Takes attention and turns it into an easy way to forget.
TV eats you, and will keep eating
until you cut if off. TV doesn’t know when to stop.
TV doesn’t stop.
TV will eat you till there’s nothing left.

Hold on to your heartbeat.
Turn off the TV and find better food, and become better food.
Find a way to feed the world that will feed you, too, instead of feeding off you.
We can’t help being food, for something.
Why not become better food than a TV dinner?
Leave it up to the TV, and
TV will eat you.