StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XI, No. XLVII

Welcome to the Pentagon,
We hope you enjoy your visit,
At the top of the escalators,
A full body search will be available:
No pistols, no rifles, no shotguns,
Blowguns and spears are prohibited,
Irritant gases and explosive devices
Will get you shot and killed, and leave
Your slingshot and weapon possession
Along with your packages at the door.

Welcome to the Pentagon this morning,
We hope you will enjoy your stay;
If there's anything more we can do for you,
Send us an email, tweet us a twit,
Visit us on Facebook and write your number
On our wall: welcome to the Reservation,
We hope you've enjoyed the show.

A murder of crows above center court,
Echoing off the Pentagon's rebuilt walls,
Each one tracked by a roof to air missile
Less one of them descecrate our walkways.

Thirteen billion years ago there are galaxies,
Fourteen billion and there's nothing,
The singularity has not expanded,
Time and space do not exist:
The universe is not empty
For the universe is not.

Upon the void a sudden light,
Helium and Hydrogen,
Then star, then galaxy,
The planets follow and life begins
To make its way across eternity.

Why don't you rock & roll me, baby,
I need to rock & roll all night,
I want some home brew cooking, darlin'.
Can't you see I'm not afraid?

I want to feel your wailin' sax, babe,
Feel your fingers across my keys,
Any old way you choose it, darlin',
Any old way you please.

The muted reds blend with gold yellow,
Pulling the eye from the brown green
Promise of swiftly fading Autumn
As televisions prophesy the first hard frost,
Speculate the depth of the snow to come,
All to no end: the earth moves,
Tilting one way then the other in its orbit
Around the inconstant heat of its sun.

We all swore we would never make
All the mistakes our parents did;
Instead we went out and invented
A half dozen or more new ones
And, for good measure, afterwards
We ran through the same ones
We charged our parents with
So that our own children,
Darlings that they are, could have
Something of their own to bitch about.
We pretty well did it all up and walking good,
But, before I pass from this world
Of wondrous and unlimited opportunities,
I have two or three decades left
To find my own, my singular perfect screw-up:
When I get there, I will leave you
A brief note, and perhaps some fingerprints,
So you can be sure it's mine.

Dark clouds over darker skies,
Rain in the street,
A sea of cars around me;
Autumn leaves falling in the wind,
Slippering the road,
Shooting adrenaline through my veins
As we stop and go our way
Around the beltway,
Every last son and daughter of us
Wondering if we'll make it home tonight,
Tomorrow, or by next December.

The chopper patrols overhead,
Looking for perps and curious bystanders,
Checking to see if we're here.
There are eyes everywhere:
Theirs, ours, and God knows whose,
We are well alarumed, if nothing else;

Our role in all this
Is to pretend not to notice
The faces in the shadows,
The odd ambience of the phone,
The electronic eddies murmuring in the air
Around us; we are not amused but we accept
The inevitabilities of governments, spies, and nations.

A charming young prince in waiting,
Oldest son of a would be king,
Took his good time proposing to the woman
Who would be his beautiful queen.

He said he'd have done it sooner,
Officially consumated his royal duties,
If only his Grand Mum had promised
To give Brittania to him more directly.

Let us all be quite thankful and joyful
For the reign of our handsome young prince,
He looks so striking in his uniforms
And he doesn't have his father's ears.

Ten billion earthlike planets
Scattered throughout the Milky Way,
How many civilizations come and gone,
A million years here, ten thousand there,
The outstretched hands forgotten or undiscovered?

There are galaxies as far as we can see,
Worlds, whose messiahs were never crucified,
Orbiting unidentified stars beyond our eyes,
Life whose gods are as distant as the stars
And nebulae that populate their heavens;

Life where evolution has not yet approached
The necessary window, moments where asteroids
Have shattered the fragile glass, reshuffled
All the available cards, and sent life back to study
The blueprints and begin once more.

We are here, poised on the precipice
Of our latest great adventure, stories of Ulysses
Still firmly fixed in our heads as we struggle
To overcome our evolutionary oversights,
Negotiating our instrincts and structural failures
While we wait to take that inevitible step
That will lead us out of this momentary dead end.

We shall live or we shall die,
There is no constancy in the gods or universe;
Our time expires as the earth moves on
And our moment is lost forever
In a bright spiral of infinite possibilities
That rises from the darkness in which
We find ourselves once again.