24 Space poems

Lined up behind the space bartender is the meaning of it all, the vessels marked with letters, numbers, signs. Beyond the flats the monitor looms, for all the world like the world. Images and motions, weeping women, men in hats. I have killed many happy hours here, with my bare hands, where TV passes for IV, among the space cadets and dingbats.

I'm writing upside down with the space pen, listening to the rain. My wife is writing about the Black Death and its effects on Art, and asks me “Where are your pants?” They are on the floor in front of our new couch, where I arrange them to spell out L-O-V-E. A vegetable, mystic thrill runs through me— the couch is something's antenna. It bears good love to us here over the laundromat. I'm waiting for the Light Beings to remove my roof. Our bedroom is lousy with clothes spelling out greetings if anyone's up there who can read English.

"Organizers Abruptly Cancel 25"' Anniversary Gala Honoring NASA's Hubble Telescope As Riots Burn Through Baltimore" The camera is having trouble focusing. A blurry spot where the universe is. Outside, a storm is brewing, trashcans into windshields. Outside agitators, a nebula of thick dust. The images are black and white but you can imagine the green of this star's birth as its extra spirals out. This spring a cosmic mirage where you could watch, on every television, the death of a star in a supernova explosion nine billion years ago across the cosmos. Here in Sandtown, six men have broken the spine of another. It was a mistake to send the camera out so quickly. Easy to fix the lens but nearly impossible to reach it, as far out from us as it has drifted already.

On February 7, 1979, Pluto crossed over Neptune’s orbit and became the eighth planet from the sun for twenty years. A study in 1988 determined that Pluto’s path of orbit could never be accurately predicted. Labeled as “chaotic,” Pluto was later discredited from planet status in 2006. Today, I broke your solar system. Oops. My bad. Your graph said I was supposed to make a nice little loop around the sun. Naw. I chaos like a motherfucker. Ain’t no one can chart me. All the other planets, they think I’m annoying. They think I’m an escaped moon, running free. Fuck your moon. Fuck your solar system. Fuck your time. Your year? Your year ain’t shit but a day to me. I could spend your whole year turning the winds in my bed. Thinking about rings and how Jupiter should just pussy on up and marry me by now. Your day? That’s an asswipe. A sniffle. Your whole day is barely the start of my sunset. My name means hell, bitch. I am hell, bitch. All the cold you have yet to feel. Chaos like a motherfucker. And you tried to order me. Called me ninth. Somewhere in the mess of graphs and math and compass you tried to make me follow rules. Rules? Fuck your rules. Neptune, that bitch slow. And I deserve all the sun I can get, and all the blue-gold sky I want around me. It is February 7th, 1979 and my skin is more copper than any sky will ever be. More metal. Neptune is bitch-sobbing in my rearview, and I got my running shoes on and all this sky that’s all mine. Fuck your order. Fuck your time. I realigned the cosmos. I chaosed all the hell you have yet to feel. Now all your kids in the classrooms, they confused. All their clocks: wrong. They don’t even know what the fuck to do. They gotta memorize new songs and shit. And the other planets, I fucked their orbits. I shook the sky. Chaos like a motherfucker. It is February 7th, 1979. The sky is blue-gold: the freedom of possibility. Today, I broke your solar system. Oops. My bad.

"The Eagle has landed!" —Apollo II Commander Neil A. Armstrong "A magnificent desolation!" — Air Force Colonel Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin, Jr. July 20, 1969 That afternoon in mid-July, Two pilgrims watched from distant space The moon ballooning in the sky. They rose to meet it face-to-face. Their spidery spaceship,Eagle, dropped Down gently on the lunar sand. And when the module's engines stopped, Rapt silence fell across the land. The first man down the ladder, Neil, Spoke words that we remember now— “One small step...” It made us feel As if we were there too, somehow. When Neil planted the flag and Buzz Collected lunar rocks and dust, They hopped like kangaroos because Of gravity. Or wanderlust? A quarter million miles away, One small blue planet watched in awe. And no one who was there that day Will soon forget the sight they saw.

Drunker than Voyager I but not as Voyager 2 I rode my blue bike back through the darkness to my lonely geode cave of light awaiting nothing under the punctured dome. I had achieved escape velocity drinking clear liquid starlight at the Thunderbird with a fingerless Russian hedge fund inspector and one who called himself The Champ. All night I felt fine crystals cutting my lips like rising up through a hailstorm. And the great vacuum cleaner that cannot be filled moved through my chest, gathering conversation dust and discharging it through my borehole. During one of many silences The Champ took off his face and thus were many gears to much metallic laughter revealed. Long ago I forgot the word which used to mean in truth but now expresses disbelief. So quickly did my future come. You who are floating past me on your inward way, please inform those glowing faces who first gave me this shove I have managed to rotate my brilliant golden array despite their instructions.

The canals of Mars beseech various oxides, vast dust storms of a dulled red, a daytime warmth that only reaches so far. Let’s call these fissures canals so we’ll think of Venice looking through our telescope as Mars comes this close in this our anniversary year with its thin atmosphere and, to be probed, its extreme cold.

to enter the sky with our bodies the principal concern for inventing airplanes no one taught me this any more than they taught me to say good morning to my hippocampus but I do because I love my hippocampus I was in a band one summer we never could harmonize we smiled and kept playing we loved our united disunity a wild stubborn focus chewing its way out how awkward the archer after shooting his arrow remembering first time getting into bed just for sex they say I’m old now ask my advice all I have to offer is make as many mistakes as you can handle but make them as soon as possible oh and don’t waste time following each other from opposite sides of the river when storm blows wig off my head it simply means it is time to let the storm take its share

I have a special ticket to another planet beyond this Earth. A comfortable world, and beautiful: a world without much smoke, not too hot and not too cold. The creatures are gentler there, and the governments have no secrets. The police are nonexistent: there are no problems and no fights. And the schools don’t exhaust their students with too much work for history has yet to start and there’s no geography and no other languages. And even better: the war has left its “r ” behind and turned into love, so the weapons sleep beneath the dust, and the planes pass by without shelling the cities, and the boats look like smiles on the water. All things are peaceful and kind on the other planet beyond this Earth. But still I hesitate to go alone.

We pull off to a road shack in Massachusetts to watch men walk on the moon. We did the same thing for three two one blast off, and now we watch the same men bounce in and out of craters. I want a Coke and a hamburger. Because the men are walking on the moon which is now irrefutably not green, not cheese, not a shiny dime floating in a cold blue, the way I'd thought, the road shack people don't notice we are a black family not from there, the way it mostly goes. This talking through static, bounces in space- boots, tethered to cords is much stranger, stranger even than we are.