Our Place in the Tapes

 rewinding our tapes so we're ready to be played again. 

Previews first, we advertise highlights of someone else's story 

and try to find our name along the credit reel.

With each frame of someone else, we feign our introduction, 

giving us time to find a name for ourselves besides Nostalgic. 

We play our title screen with one finger on the pause button 

and another on the stop,

each time waiting from inside the screen as the viewer watches back. 

Our audience makes us hold our tongues,

 but if the screen went black tomorrow, 

at least we could say our system failed before we did. 

At least we wouldn't have to skip over the scenes that no longer play, 

and stay frozen in a frame refusing to tell the rest of the story. 

At least then our tapes wouldn't be pulled out and realigned,

trying to find the scratch in a single frame that ruined the rest of the film.

If the screen went black, 

and we couldn't be blamed for not having more to show, 

we'd celebrate by letting go of all the scenes that are hard to watch, 

but instead we paste film to film in our hope to never play off into a blue screen, 

disappearing into the static. 

We play our tapes so never to be called out-dated,

 and so we can keep our name in the previews of other peoples stories. 

Again and again we go back to every scene and try to find the truth in every frame. 

We're a movie without a story line,

rehearsing a script that stops halfway through, 

but if we pause the show too long our audience won't be captive anymore. 

If we wait for our train of thought to make the station, 

those among us will find themselves on the runway,

ready to take off. 

Maybe it is our fear that while the countryside passes along our window, 

our cast will get tired of the way the earth looks so flat on the ground. 

Our journey becomes no longer great enough and our story becomes too predictable.

We are afraid that someone will see us and say our frames are all the same, 

so as to keep us from making a plot where we're our own gold chalice.

Instead we accept plot twists to add 'dynamic' 

and allow our stories to be edited by someone who's only seen our previews.

We create lines of credits for everyone else besides ourselves 

and say thank you to those who took our name off the script. 

At least this way, 

we know someone else will watch us if only to see how we've been created. 

At least we know when the plot thickens that its not time for our happy ending,

that is,

it's not the end. 

We don't want to keep playing but even more, 

we fear the credits roll.

We fear to be reduced to a series of names of people we barely knew, 

and to become dependent on those who watched us to share our story. 

Maybe it's is our hope that one day someone will stumble across our tv set 

and see us playing out across the screen,

and rather than pull out our tapes,

they first try pushing play.