FOR I HAVE PLAYED GUITAR HERO (after Lucia Perillo)
Whilst sitting in my overstuffed recliner,
Which is not done in other XBOX countries.
A kid across an ocean told me “You need stand. Always!”
I rattled off facts about Led Zepplin, Pink Floyd, and Deep Purple.
Though I spoke with authority and cut him off,
a Singapore third grader beat me and yelled “You suck!” in perfect English.
Now they have long since put their games away
and gone to school or bed, I wonder
if they remember any more of me than the flood of curse
words flowing from my lips, or how I’d correct their English
between them yelling “Just hit red button stupid!”
and me saying they are too young to be watching “Desperate Housewives” and
how nobody in America still watches “Family Matters” or “Full House.”
I held their love of Erkel against them, refused to talk about the Olsen twins.
But how I envied how they sliced with the chainsaw in Gears of War,
their aim with the Barret .50 cal sniper rifle in Call of Duty 4,
recoiling them back to stunned confusion when I tell them I’m twice their age.
Then a kid from Micronesia yells “Then, you really suck!” while I die again.
I had to say, “I’ve got a job and I can’t play as much as you,”
I was such an idiot I even tried to apologize
for playing so badly, their replies held back as my character was
dismembered, disemboweled, burned, shot, stabbed, or beaten.
Watching the red neon blood splatter inside my television
forming into the words “YOU LOSE,” at last I understood
That I understood not one thing about their world, and
never would. Near the end of my XBOX LIVE membership
I lost so much
they stopped playing with me.
They probably
pictured me sitting on a curb
wearing a too tight,
stained white t-shirt
stretched over a Cheetos gut
with my orange flecked,
gap-toothed mouth
open in permanent surprise.
But, I turned out to be normal among them, just another American
getting beaten at their own games, tolerated and humored
until replaced by someone who could play the little plastic guitar with
precise, frenzied fingers between trig homework and “Who’s the Boss?”
Then one day I played against a high school kid in Wyoming
I shredded him with my guitar, the hayseed said he was high so it didn’t count,
But still I yelled “You Suck!” in perfect English.
Grant Bergland has a B.A. in English from Arizona State University and teaches film in San Francisco. He is a graduate student at Cal State East Bay, where he was awarded the 2009 Associated Students Scholarship and won second prize in the 2009 Donald Markos poetry contest. More info at www.grantbergland.com
