Bio: Jeffrey Park lives in Goettingen, Germany where he is Lecturer for Scientific English at the Georg-August-Universitaet. Links to all of his published work can be found at www.scribbles-and-dribbles.com.
AFTERMATH
Long after the resistance
has been crushed
and the shimmering network
of attack vessels
has faded from the sky –
after the last traces
of organic life
have been cleared away,
radio waves crackling with
alien transmissions
writhe over the land,
blanketing once-fertile fields
with harsh white noise.
MORAL HAZARD
The way they squirmed and struggled
and carried on emitting bubbling noises
from their repulsive fleshy orifices,
almost as if in an attempt to communicate,
you might have imagined – just for
a moment, mind – might have imagined
them to be sentient beings of some sort.
Ridiculous, of course, to entertain such
thoughts about primitive bipedal life forms.
Nevertheless, in a purely hypothetical way,
one could allow oneself to speculate,
to conduct a thought experiment of sorts –
if it really were so, my goodness,
what kind of monsters would we be?
ROUGH SPORT
Just neighborhood kids,
harmless enough in their own
xenophobic way.
They never preyed on
weaklings or stray dogs,
but they showed little mercy
to any aliens that chanced to
fall into their hands.
Jesus, how this one stinks
when you poke it with a stick,
the boys would shriek,
quick, check this out,
this one’s full of lemon goo!
Boys will be boys,
the old folks would always say.
And really, who’s going to
have much sympathy
for creatures so damn stuck up
as to refer to themselves as
“extra” terrestrials?
Long after the resistance
has been crushed
and the shimmering network
of attack vessels
has faded from the sky –
after the last traces
of organic life
have been cleared away,
radio waves crackling with
alien transmissions
writhe over the land,
blanketing once-fertile fields
with harsh white noise.
MORAL HAZARD
The way they squirmed and struggled
and carried on emitting bubbling noises
from their repulsive fleshy orifices,
almost as if in an attempt to communicate,
you might have imagined – just for
a moment, mind – might have imagined
them to be sentient beings of some sort.
Ridiculous, of course, to entertain such
thoughts about primitive bipedal life forms.
Nevertheless, in a purely hypothetical way,
one could allow oneself to speculate,
to conduct a thought experiment of sorts –
if it really were so, my goodness,
what kind of monsters would we be?
ROUGH SPORT
Just neighborhood kids,
harmless enough in their own
xenophobic way.
They never preyed on
weaklings or stray dogs,
but they showed little mercy
to any aliens that chanced to
fall into their hands.
Jesus, how this one stinks
when you poke it with a stick,
the boys would shriek,
quick, check this out,
this one’s full of lemon goo!
Boys will be boys,
the old folks would always say.
And really, who’s going to
have much sympathy
for creatures so damn stuck up
as to refer to themselves as
“extra” terrestrials?
No comments:
Post a Comment