A boy alone in the cellar
Glow from the dials alight
Small moves of the fine tuning knob
4-6-2-5 comes into sight
The vacuum tubes hiss alive
The speakers crackle and whine
Buzz-buzz-click marks the cadence
Signal acquired in record time
Then came a voice from the noise
For a moment the chaos ceased
A string of nonsense heard loud and clear
Coming in from somewhere northeast
The boy scratched it down so quickly
But the message seemed incomplete
So he kept on hunting the band
Scanning the dial on repeat
For years he stayed glued to the dial
Surfing the shortwave, 3 to 30
That brief point of contact now lost
Isolation the last boundary.
Fast forward many years later
The lone boy now a lonely man
Tubes now traded for transistors
Eyes still pinned to the shortwave band
Technology grew, he refused
Still chasing that phantom beacon
A heterodyne collision bursts
But the signal does not weaken
So he squelches the static hiss
Tuning out the noise on the channel
Calling all stations on the dial
Eyes on the instrument panel
Then suddenly he remembered why
He first sought this exotic wave
If only to connect back to
The innocence before the grave
“U-V-B-7-6 do you read?”
He calls clearly into the void
He thought he heard a voice once
But perhaps he was paranoid
Then spoke a voice so crystal clear
The spooky code of dissonance
He scribbles it down once again
But it still didn’t make much sense
In a flash it came into focus
The purpose of the transmission
It was never meant to make sense.
It signals the human condition
Mannino Acid 