The Tale of Joe's Remote

Inspired by July 22, 2005 News: "It is a known fact that men tend to like being in charge of the TV remote control. The staff at an old folk's home in Romania found out when two of their older pensioners came to blows and had to receive hospital treatment after an argument over who should be in charge of the device."


Not young but arched, slouched on the couch;
his single antidote
to age, Joe clicked the tinder box
for channels, so remote.

The sound of chatter from his wife;
she clattered the counters
and asked him to switch channels
to dreamy encounters.

But Joe was mad; he tossed a shoe
at wife's ravioli.
"No one takes my doodad away.
Scram! You, roly-poly!"

So, wife was gone; his deed was done.
He grabbed the old gizmo,
but some days, in disjointed ways,
Joe rued his machismo.

In time, when Joe ripened with age
and had his head in clouds,
a nursing home his nest was deemed
to deal with friendly crowds.

In "Shady Oaks," life was crass, but
Joe ran a combat plan;
he soon hijacked TV's remote,
tackling another man.

With oaths and canes, the two men fought
for clicks, as if manhood;
in hospital, they then renounced
that old remote for good.


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Ballad
As the basic, narrative form descending from the earliest periods of poetry, a ballad is a poem in four-line stanzas usually written to be sung. Although ballads are mostly used as the main vehicles for stories, songs, and light-hearted verse, truly great poetry has been written in this form for centuries.
The folk ballad, also called the standard ballad, may use a frequent repetition of a key word, line or phrase and is usually impersonal, written in third person.
The literary ballad is not impersonal and may use meter. The most common meter for a ballad is iambic and a ballad stanza's first and third lines contain four feet or accents while the second and fourth contain three.
The traditional ballad stanza's four lines are rhymed as: abcb or abab and the standard syllable count is 8/6/8/6.
La Belle Dame Sans Merci by john Keats is like a fold ballad but is a literary ballad, since the literary ballad imitates the spirit and form of the folk ballad with dialogue and repetition. Some other examples of ballads are by: Coleridge, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner; William Butler Yeats, The Ballad Of Father Gilligan; H. W. Longfellow, The Wreck of the Hesperus.