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
Added by Poetry Lover
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