off-the-air in poetry

there used to be television sign-offs
times after midnight or one somewheres
where a station would play a schedule
a national anthem or some prayers
then the channel there would just
stop
cut to a rainbow and a dial tone
for four hours or maybe five
only to restart around the sunrise

times when the television set said
“the world is pausing for a while”
it is time to sleep
or possibly have sex then sleep
but sleep was surely in the equation
the television used to tell us
it was okay to stop and rest
for a little while
here are four or five hours when
nothing important will be happening
you don’t have to think about
the world’s big problems for now
it’s okay
you earned this

it sounds unbelievably quaint now
like a ritual for the reformed Amish
who would only eschew technology between
the end of David Letterman and the
start of the morning farm report
but back then it seemed completely natural

before the internet before
before CNN gave us a twenty-four
hour documentary report on the
on-goings of the first Gulf War
it seemed like the order of
how things would always work

even though television had only been
around forty or fifty years and
the idea of a television station
that would tell us it was okay
to rest for a little while at night
would only last another twenty years
still
when we were then and there
it seemed Permanent

a fun and terrible quirk
of our short short lives combined
with an only intermittent
consciousness thereof is that
whatever was considered normal
when we were young
is considered in our minds
as a past-and-future permanent truth
we’re left to either change
or find a way to fill in the gap

let’s make a four hour loop
of that rainbow pattern and the beep
play it on the youtube
on our phones and our computers
from one thirty in the morning
to about five thirty at the dawn
we can pretend there is a time
when we are allowed to be off
maybe then we’ll feel again
like there is a time when
we feel actually on