Hit this before in my life... the TIME_WAIT is an artifact of TCP/IP so you are stuck with it. It can be tweaked via /proc (see serverfault 23385) but a better way would be a solution that opened a persistent socket that works as long as needed.
generate_lots_of_lines | ssh myhost 'while read line; do echo ":$line"; done;'
This way you can have one connection do many things based on what the client sends the server.
