STARDUST MEMORIES
How ephemeral even the most dynamic of news stories are if they concern only the welfare of others. Hence the 'compassion fatigue' that set in after the heart-rending & breast-beating of Live Aid 17 years ago. We wept, we dug deep, we moved on because no-one on our street was starving to death & we just stopped believing that there really were people in the world whose ribs you could count through their skin.
And space has long been on the slide as fertile territory for juicy news. We mourned the dead astronauts decently, but maybe Bruce Willis & Sigourney Weaver have just spent a bit too long flexing muscles up there amongst the stars for interest to be long sustained.
But 60 or 70 years-worth of sci fi prophets had it right: when the Saddams & Dubyas of this planet have run out of irradiation room, the battle for the planets will begin. Both Islam & America's manifest destiny will have them spreading the words & weapons of mass destruction in our name. Then where does anybody hide?
I had a notion of an astronaut sent out by the men & women in white coats & shades to explore the outer reaches. But when he gets out there he doesn't want to come back...
SEA OF STARS
They will ask,
should I return,
to give them names
for all the things I saw.
Even as I feed back
voltage, trickle chemistry
past their electrodes;
even as I share
my heartbeat with their monitors,
my blood with their microscopes,
they will question
in quiet voices,
seeking out new nouns
with which to corner
the ineffable, new verbs
to charge the immaterial.
And now their aerial voices -
filtered through ionosphere,
the shingle-clouds of asteroids,
across these tideless oceans -
whisper insubstantial, needle-thin,
scratching their need to know
the unknowable onto the mighty
silence. I trail interrogation
like a shower of sparks.
But from this eminence
I no longer heed
their eyes that scrutinize,
lidless, unswerving. This dark
accomodates a billion eyes,
speculating my parabola
by day, by night, probing
for my tiny skidding light.
Implacable, incurious, I navigate
the brilliant wastes - long black sargassos
drifting, planet wrack and flotsam,
dereliction. And beyond, always beyond,
the bright flying splinters of the stars.
12:28:40 AM 
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