Worlds Beyond
((A
Primitive Story) (in Poetic Prose))
I live on
the planet Pluto.
I live like mist, vapor in a kind of
impregnable bright bubble, as thick as the old walls of Troy.
Waiting, I’m always waiting, it is
all I know.
I see the cold stars of night and the
glitter of the sun—
At times I see the blue planet called
Earth, it is nearly as old as Pluto.
It is hard for me to explain who I
am, when I really don’t know what I am, or how I came about.
I need comparisons!
And I know of none!
Thus, I cannot explain.
I am lonely and old, I know that.
Sometimes I feel numb, like the thick
ice on Pluto.
The atmosphere drifts off the planet
like someone smoking a Lucky Strike in an open bar, I got that information from
listening to old radio waves from the Planet Earth.
I sense the cool silence of the long
days here too, as long as Earth’s week!
Perhaps today is the day I will no
longer have to wait?
A question to myself.
I see a metallic object from a
distance.
I hear metal clashing with debris.
I can hear and I can see.
And I hear voices from afar,
four-billion miles away.
“All right” I say, Earth voices are
commanding the object!
Some of the words are familiar, can
this object send a living being down?
It has an insignia on it.
If it lands I will look like a big
eye to them.
But the object is just circling
Pluto.
What are they doing?
It is a tireless task waiting.
Its construction is weird.
It took seven years to get here!
I’ve waited 10,000-years for this?
Now I know who I am! I think?
And I am nothing like them.
Man makes due anywhere, simply
because he’s man; here there is only me.
I don’t breath like them, and I am
per near inexhaustible—
Perhaps that’s the price one has to
pay for longevity.
I hear pain and fear and sorrow in
their voices, some rejoicing.
I hear they get sick too, I don’t.
They have happiness that of course is
a byproduct, you need to make someone happy to be happy, it takes two, and this
I don’t have, as I well know.
Their probe didn’t even see me, I
wonder if I’m even visible to them?
I think what I am is some
gravitational collapse of what was once a sufficiently compact mass form of
something, and I’m the leftover, but what?
They have shadows, I don’t; I have
words, and they have actions; I waste time, they can’t, it is a sin for them,
and for them, time is a clock, and it is
ticking.
#4914/11-20-2015 (Reedited and revised
slightly, 12-27-2015)
