PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

[after Seeker's poem, "Last Path"]

"'How did you end up becoming a ship?'"

---Cordwainer Smith, "Three To A Given Star," ii

"I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch:

How should I use it for your closer contact?"

---T. S. Eliot, "Gerontion"

"He twisted his language into such contortions"

that even the koinos kosmos laughed at the distortions."

---A. Chester Glass, "Thought Sought In A Fraught Onslaught," xix:82

This trajectory

  is transfinite;

and I am compelled

  to follow its contours.

So far into forward time,

  so far from the backward origin:

the star which sustained my birthplace

  swelled devoured three inner planets, and snuffed out.

I may not alter the course over which I hurl:

  this sleek, massive vessel that has become my body,

has too many failsafes and redundancies

  to be persuaded by my reluctances and hesitations.

Accelerated to nearly the speed of light

  (I was not permitted to learn of the process,

that I might not impede or obstruct its success),

  I have traversed such distances for so long

that I can not, any more, detect the local limb

  of the galaxy in which that stellar smear of light

that once the poets of my people

  had called, The Milky Way.

Horrific existences lurk in their natural habitat out here;

  sentiences that have no intelligence;

hatreds that explode from no other emotion;

  too large, too mammoth, too alien to notice me.

But I have no choice:  I must notice them;

  must feel the waves of their cosmic distortions

slam against my hull and seep into, and through, it---

  vertigo and nausea overcome me.

The project managers removed my brain from my adolescent body---

  that they deemed a useless, subversive, too feminine boy.

I did not even have the chance to part, decently, from my lover;

  I doubt if anyone ever explained it fully to him.

They placed me in the heavily shieled core of this

  enormous, probing mechanism constructed upon

the labors of countless multitudes, mercilessly driven;

  this great and grandiose emissary of the human species.

They tore from my mind all but one memory of my boy friend:

  that summer afternoon we explored my grandparents' wild meadow;

baggy jeans and stripey socks sufficed for that weather and surface---

  we left our shoes and shirts beneath a tree, and let our long hair cascade.

Some part of me relives that event in every nanosecond

  of this artificial existence they have imposed on me;

it never stales. Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale

  its infine variety.  I cannot remember who said that.

That glow over there---it appears as a kind of horizon---

  is that the edge?  The unspeakable terrora arise from there;

the hideous, formless abominations,

  jubilantly menacing in unimaginable aberration.

Starward