The speaker stands at a podium and addresses the audience as "ladies and gentlemen," but the talk quickly turns from polite formality to something more unsettled. Driving on a highway with upside-down signs and no lines is a picture of disorientation: the usual guides are gone, or flipped, and everyone has to adjust anyway. The poem doesn't say what caused this feeling, so it could stand for grief, change, or any stretch of life when the rules stop working.
What the speaker offers is small and practical. People cling to maps, menus, receipts, and remembered lines of poetry, ordinary scraps that give a sense of direction. In the last stanza, the audience grows to include children, and the advice becomes more urgent: hold on to belief, even when it rests on "skeletal trees" in grey days. The mood is bleak but quietly stubborn. The repeated "Hold on" sounds less like a lecture than a plea, and a gentle one.