James Stemmle's "Cheap" opens like a swimmer breaking the surface. The speaker has "surfaced" and is "coming up for air," and the poem is driven by the clarity of that first breath. After some time away from the noise, he sees how little our attention is worth to us, and how readily we hand it over. The title word returns at the end of the second stanza, "life has become so cheap," and the rest of the poem tests that claim against one ordinary scene: watching football on television.
The reasoning of the opening is slightly twisted, and deliberately so. The speaker discovers what he "never saw before" because he was "too close to the / forest and not isolated." It recalls the old saying about not seeing the forest for the trees, but here the forest is culture itself, a crowd he has been "rubbing shoulders" with. Only "enough solitude" lets him step back far enough to judge it. Solitude works in the poem like a lens.
Once he can see, the vocabulary turns to money. Attention "goes for nothing," we "spend our attention," and the commercials ask us to part "with money." "Cheap" is almost literal here: attention is treated as a currency and is being spent at a discount. Beside it sits the image of "seconds that never come / back just keep ticking away," which makes the loss irreversible. The football setting suits this. "Turnover," "time out" and "commercial break" are all words of interruption. Judging by the wording, "turnover" may also carry its business meaning, and "time out" quietly rejoins the poem's concern with time. The most unsettling detail is a small one: we spend our attention "without / anger rising." The speaker's complaint is less about the ads than about how calmly we sit through them.
The poem then ventures into the commercials themselves. "Ask your doctor if it's right for you" is the familiar phrase of a medicine advertisement, and the sentence slides straight on, with no full stop, into a promise of "total serenity," "lovers and family in your old / age," and a "perfect high tech / car." One product melts into the next, as though every purchase were the same purchase and the same happiness were being sold over and over. Because there is no punctuation anywhere, it is hard to say where the advertisement stops and the speaker's own voice resumes. The poem sounds like a broadcast that has taken over its narrator.
The last stanza is the most carefully made. "Mountain passes through snow," "Christmas," "warm / light and happy people within" make an image that is undeniably attractive, with cold outside and glow inside. The poem lets us feel the pull of the picture it is criticising. It also contains a quiet irony. The fantasy is built from emptiness: "empty city streets" and a "remote cabin." These are exactly the quiet and isolation the speaker had to step away from culture to find, now packaged as something to buy, and mixed with family and a crowd of happy people. The ad promises solitude and company at once, which is the kind of contradiction a commercial never has to explain.
Formally, the poem is seven quatrains of free verse with no rhyme. It is lowercase apart from "I" and "Christmas," and it has almost no punctuation. The lines break on small, unstressed words ("to the," "and," "in your old"), so the sense always spills into the next line and the voice never gets to rest. That gives the rhythm a conversational, breathless drift, like a monologue or a stream of broadcast chatter. Sometimes the break itself comments: "in your old / age" leaves old age stranded at the start of a new line, a brief pause where the ad's cheerfulness is thinnest.
The ending is abrupt. The poem stops on "a remote cabin" with no verdict and no return to the speaker's anger, or lack of it. Having seen the ad's picture, the reader is left to notice whether it worked. That is the poem's strength. It doesn't lecture about attention. It makes the reader feel attention being captured, and then lets "cheap" settle in as the right word for what just happened.