Starfall
I would have wept (had I been able)
in order to more fully feel
the grandeur, the tragedy,
the cosmic conclusion
that only a celestial body can experience…
For, even now,
reduced to neural impulses
and egocentric forces
(with too little matter to matter),
and consequently more equipped
to absorb, evaluate, and transduce
the energies transmitted throughout space;
more directly shocking, stimulating, synergizing
to what once were my synapses…
I cannot completely comprehend,
cannot assimilate all components
that transpire throughout the universe,
cannot empathize on egalitarian terms
with such phenomena as the death of stars…
cannot compensate for,
nor obliterate the fact
that once I was a man.
Distant Affairs (or Lightyears Away)
When we smoog, it is so glitchy of a thing:
to feel the shocking tingle of your static current
as you frouk yourself to discharge
is to skitterflit recklessly through the shriking steons
of the Great Void
with need of a skitter,
and to watch your tentacles fribble in the gently blowing warze
is to hear the scrooning tonks of a finely tuned gutstrummer
as it is wailed by the master Wilmz
while being accompanied by the entire
Lonyerk Semble in full marzifan.
But, when you apply full suction
to my quiescently questing mandible,
the very croots of my pulsating hergan are stimulated
to an excruciating pitch
by the exquisite smutch
of your singularly sophisticated longueth,
and I feel the stangly explosion in my expanded
sensory/intellectual/imaginative capacity
like the final pyrotechnicalizationism of a steon
as it initiates the nova state.
To smoog, to smoog recklessly, without raisondetre,
without regard to socio/political import,
or to the procreation of either of our species,
or even to the fact that we are at present
many lightyears apart in the tempisical sense,
is ultimately so glitchy of a thing.
Landing Phase (dedicated to Enterprise)
From out of the endless void we fell at over Mach twenty-five;
with an L to D of four-to-one, our descent was more of a dive.
But the stick was dead and the hull was red,
so we rode her down to the onrushing ground
and just hoped we would somehow survive.
At seventeen-thousand feet we began our so-called landing phase,
and the blessed CPU kicked in without its normal delays.
So, despite the glows from the blazing nose,
we could feel some float start around the bird’s throat,
and we sang that great programmer’s praise.
We didn’t hit much of a thermal, but then, it doesn’t matter much—
because she’s a silo with stubs for wings, the bird doesn’t have much touch.
Since her normal place is flying through space,
we try not to mind if the landing aren’t kind..
if they don’t leave us needing a crutch.
That last roll-reversal left us dead center of the glideslope corridor;
at twenty degrees and three-hundred knots, the bird is begging for more.
But the pathy lights have just come into sight,
and the CRTs swear that it’s time for pre-flare,
‘though the vehicle still wants to soar.
The horizon blazes with whiteness as the sand reflects the sun,
and we know, one way or another, we’ll soon come to the end of our run.
With hardly a sound the gear quickly drops down,
and tension runs high as we drop from the sky
in a bird that weighs ninety-nine tons.
We’ve resumed the controls, and it’s time to find out exactly what we’re worth,
for the place that we’ve been makes us feel we’ve returned to find our soul’s rebirth.
And when we anoint the long waited touchpoint,
the drums seem to roll as I say to control:
“The first spaceship has landed on Earth.”
IC Shorts (or “Exposing Our Microparts to Public Ridicule”)
There once was a smug CPU
that figured it was human, too,
because it used hex
to talk about sex,
and expanded itself from base two.
There was a young android named Chip
whose programmer shot from the hip
with strong verbal commands
to ignore all demands
so that Chip wouldn’t take any lip.
An angry CPU name of Sam
had a volatile eight meg of RAM,
and it wanted to fight,
but was told that it’s byte
was a quasi-electrical sham.
A lonely single-board micro “C”
wanted more that in-built memory,
so connected its heart
to peripheral parts,
and today it’s a whole family!
