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Five Hundred Channels and Nothing On

By Kevin Ridgeway

Five Hundred Channels and Nothing On

After Letterman signed off and the cartoon Peacock serenaded us with its three tone sign-off warning me to avert my eyes of the artificial bars of what looked just like the rainbow beam-stitched curtain but no Jack Paar successor hired to keep us all at ease, the retired magician who always demonstrated his improved golf swing in the wake of pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization, while an eerie beep told us to go to sleep. I can’t find those bars or that sound in the months following David Letterman’s retirement ten years after the death of a secret magic composed of wild, wild stuff comedy needs a transplant for so there will be no humorless misery in all the infomercial women that are not even beautiful enough to make an insomniac headache disappear in the nocturnal tenderness of a five am weather girl juvenile gameshow manning the remote from bed at three in the morning as human and animal faces plead with me to adopt them or let them predict my future and I snore through a public access channel’s encore presentation of Dorf on Golf that makes me dream in closed captioning.

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About the Author: Kevin Ridgeway is from Whittier, CA. He is the author of six chapbooks of poetry. His latest book is A Ludicrous Split (alongside poems by Gabriel Ricard, Alien Buddha Press). Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Slipstream, Chiron Review, Up the River, Nerve Cowboy, The American Journal of Poetry, Main Street Rag, Cultural Weekly, San Pedro River Review, Lummox, Misfit Magazine, The Cape Rock, Plainsongs and So it Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. He lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.