TV was eternity.
There was always the promise of snow.
Fingers ribbon black with fiddling,
type and leading shaky.
Some characters filled in,
keys stuck.
I never had a golfball
or anything selectric.
I was scribe of the old school,
still scribble to this day.
Kettle and fan for company.
No silent night—
my fridge was rocket ship in kitchen then.
Never quite took off.
A record would jump then
sometimes it wouldn’t stop.
Into the early hours like that.
Even then were things
you couldn’t quite switch off.
And on the screen for company
blue loungeroom bathing of the former age.
No true colour we could call.
Ceiling and floor shrunk.
We stared into the light
of alien transmission.
The vertical,
the horizontal—
our whole world all in thrall
to a simple dying star.
Poem
In my Incunabula
Kit Kelen