TVs

by Mark Belair

The distant TV downstairs, playing
on beyond my bedtime, provided comfort
as I lay in the dark, my parents safely watching it,
sometimes chuckling though, oddly, seldom with the laugh track,
the artificial blue light, ghosting up the stairway, morphing with every cut.

But now when heard
through paper-thin walls
of roadside motels, such a sit-com,
droning on, seems sad, a hollow attempt
to fill an empty room identical, I imagine, to mine.

Though when viewed
at night from a noisy city street,
a soundless TV flickering in a vacant room
strikes me as itself forlorn—unlike sports bar TVs that,
the center of attention, seem bursting with loud showman’s pride.

Yet I find, in such
rowdy bars, that if the game
is not one I care about—because not a fan
of that team, or because the team’s in a mid-season funk,
or because not a follower of the whole, incomprehensible sport—

then it is I who feel forlorn,
surrounded by others but separated
out, the bar’s darkness, between us, thickening.
So I close my eyes and transform the game into a distant
sit-com, one back from when I was a boy who felt safe in the dark.