Jeffrey Park- Three Poems

THE VISITOR

 

Whether by fate or careful planning,

the visitor, searching for the deep

wisdom that only comes with maturity,

corporealized on the Alzheimer’s

floor of a run-down nursing home,

 

found himself in a spinning galaxy

of forgetful and forgotten grandmas

and grandpas, all of them muddled

and disheveled, and with bits of lunch

decorating their soft wrinkled chins.

 

He never did report back to his home

world – he’s still there, keeping out of

sight of the nurses, everybody’s favorite

nephew, though he seems to bear little

family resemblance to anyone at all.

 

 

 

TRAVELLER

 

The traveller traverses the kaleidoscopic

origami folds of interdimensional

 

space, counting his steps as he follows

an oblique course through gravitational

 

fluxes and clouds of asteroidal dust,

along shimmering streams of solar plasma,

 

across lava flows, sulfur lakes, desolate

sunbaked rocky plains and finally

 

into the smoke-filled alleyways of Zagreb,

Bangkok, Nairobi, Mexico City.

 

He scarcely notices the slow-moving

inhabitants of this neon-drenched landscape,

 

intent on survival and dreams of pleasure,

he steps again, alert for slight telltale

 

discrepancies in the periphery of his vision.

A ripple, almost imperceptible, moves

 

through a crowded Mumbai slum,

a Sao Paulo commuter’s heart skips a beat,

 

in a Texas town north-facing windows go

opaque for a fraction of a second.

 

The traveller steps, counts, recalibrates,

slips between the here and the now.

 

In the blink of an eye a million doors open

and close again with an inaudible sigh.

 

 

 

UFO GIGOLO

 

The thing is

he doesn’t know why they come

to him, it’s certainly not

his good looks (by what standard?)

or his intellect-

 

perhaps it’s his openness to the new

and the different.

He’s never been saddled with silly

prejudices

about skin pigment,

 

unfashionable body types

or unconventional constellations of

facial features,

scales, fur, antennae,

gills, the odd flexible tentacle or two

 

or twelve – in any case,

they do come,

are drawn to him, one might say,

and across considerable distances –

and he gives them what he can,

 

a sharing, a cross-cultural experience

they can tell

their methane-breathing cousins

about, a bit of warmth

in a cold, cold galaxy.

 

Sometimes at night he’ll gaze up

at the stars,

so distant, and wonder just how far

his terrestrial apples

may have fallen from the tree.



Bio: Jeffrey Park's poetry has appeared most recently in Danse Macabre, The Rainbow Journal, In Parentheses, and the science fiction anthology Just One More Step from Horrified Press. A native of Baltimore, Jeffrey currently lives in Munich, Germany, where he works at a private secondary school. Links to all of his published work can be found at www.scribbles-and-dribbles.com.