Click in the field, then press CTRL+C to copy the HTML code
People Of Earth
Whenever I discover what an idiot I’ve been,
I turn to television — “Oh screen of wonders, flick me
on and off like an appliance,” I implore it
and it answers back
and I cackle away in the aftermath
of its buckets of canned laughter.
I lie on my little raft wondering
whose abduction is this
anyway? “People of Earth, I have
no intention.” Damned alien, chronic
master-plan — part of some system. I try
to asphyxiate one last program, switch
to the contactees. Seems that in 1981 Debbie
divorced and went to live with her parents
@ 32,000 kilometres per hour
happy to show off,
push buttons, poke around
the house for a while, hatching her evil plot.
She spoke, when she talked at all, Phooey.
Most witnesses have the wit, but Debbie
received the phone call. “Hello, I’m Mrs
Cleaveland.” It was a small, large-headed,
grey-skinned entity — guided, she said,
by remote control by her little Maude, who,
once dead, made it safely to Mars. “My stars,
they tell me, predict the weather” — but nothing
predicted whether or not she truly spoke
the Martian language, a propellor-driven vessel
featuring flapping, inflatable wings that,
suspiciously, Maude had taken off in.
“There’s this big ball of light,” she said.
Did you believe her? Debbie did — she’d seen
the tarted-up guests and reporters being fed
to the startled backdrop: it was aquamarine, like
Maude. But as this realisation dawned then bored her,
whaddaya know, she remembered her plot —
and boy did that buck everybody up,
bucked ’em up real good.
poem
by
Chris Edwards
solid border
dashed border
dotted border
double border
groove border
ridge border
inset border
outset border
no border
blue
green
red
purple
cyan
gold
silver
black