The Television Dot

The television dot has gone away.
I bet you don’t remember
How the pictures
and the people
and the stories
all combined into that perfect shiny dot
Bang in the centre of the screen.
White, but every colour was there.
Tiny, but all the world inside.
Finite, but somehow never ending.

I’d turn on the set
Just long enough to see the dot when I turned it off.
And then I’d stare as the dot died.
Conduct flawed experiments
To extend its magical life
Hypothesizing that
if I could just stare long enough…
if I could manage not to blink…
if I could… but I couldn’t
bring the dot back.

And now it’s gone forever.
No twenty-first century set
would dare display a dot
(even to call it a set
sounds hopelessly old-fashioned)

I’d get up early just to see
Pages from Ceefax
(before breakfast TV)
And every other day the girl
From Test Card F
(you know the one,
playing noughts and crosses
with a clown that I read on the net
Was actually called Bubbles.
Carole, the girl, is almost fifty now
So she obviously survived
All those tv-dot implosions.

I wonder if my grandchildren
Will remember fondly, or disregard
The dots in the dot-coms
and email addresses
The dots in the newsprint
and this thought depresses
This middle-aged boy
Who killed his bestest friend
Twenty times a day.
I miss you, dot.