Posted by NL on October 30, 2004 at 14:52:46:
Scorpion Song
"The Spaced-Men ride the timelines
and the worldlines back
and forward again- kill
one off and another
takes his place."
Ignite the stern jet!
Fire the intestinal flare!
I want to see Deneb!
I want to see Algol!
Oh, to be born
on a worthless rock in the sky!
Cold and bare
bare and cold,
born in the sky!
That was his song, a song
of celestial longings,
for one who would one day
be famous, and stalked
by women who traced
their descent from mothers
who dunned, in their youth,
the Son Of Sam
and other serial killers
of any and every provenance,
showering them with proposals
of marriage, and other
obscene propositions.
WE remembered him as a prodigy,
a clever little boy on tv,
explaining how blobs of electrode paste
and a dry cell did his thinking for him.
"I ask it questions
and it answers!"
He said.
But he grew up and grew apart,
and did not return until
he was truly spaced, spaced-OUT,
on this and on that,
so remote and so aloof,
it really seemed
he traveled among the stars
with no spacesuit--
"and the girl's knees trembled"
for he had become a star, of sorts,
and walked among us with a vacant glare,
enveloped in fogs of condensing
oxygen and nitrogen and other
gases most rare, glue fumes
and halogen propellants,
and still he seemed to be the same
vulnerable boy, but with a rocketship
between his legs with which to fuck
in a deadly Spaced-Man fashion--
all the pretty girls ended up
dead. Cold and dead, dead and cold,
as a worthless rock in the sky.
A fascination there, as he sojourned among us,
leaving that distinctive trail of frozen
bodies, until he decided to vanish again.
And the death-wish girls grew forlorn,
for who could ever offer again
the embrace of a truly Spaced-Man?
(These women craved his cold hands,
and his meatlocker rocket.)
We saw them, some of them, departing
in furniture vans with nothing but a bedroom suite
to their name, perhaps a potted plant or two,
held in their laps as they rode
beside the drivers.
Appearances and disappearances,
rumored, plotted by morbid fans,
kept interest alive for a while.
But the story got tangled, as stories
will, twisting like ship's rigging
floating above a wreck
under the sea.
"The Spaced-Men ride the timelines
and the worldlines back
and forward again- kill
one off and another
takes his place."
So they say.
So so, say say.