ADIEU
As the change begins, memories fade
into one another, merge with the shifting
blurring flow of dream
currents – the world
where I was birthed, colors, smells, textures,
a handful of moons flung across a crimson
sky, shells of my fathers, flipper limbs
of my siblings, mother’s gelatinous caress –
Goodbye, my sweet Earthling, I’m sorry
to leave you this way, sleeping peacefully
with no intimation of what it is that has
shared your bed these many years – I shed
my skin tonight, and more, this alien flesh,
these eyes,
tissues, organs – cast them
off with a sense of relief, to be born again
as a creature of your wildest imaginings,
the chimera you never suspected, stranger,
visitor who came and loved you for a few
revolutions of this planet around its star
and left you with nothing but memories
and vain questions and a telltale smear
of exotic goo on my side of the bed.
HOT DAMN, THEY’RE HERE
I knew it had to happen sometime
and now it sure damn shit is –
finally at long last and without any big
eyewitness-news-at-eleven to-do
THEY’RE COMING DOWN
they’re actually coming down to earth
or Planet ZB705-137 or some such
in their crazy vernacular
and now they did it and here they are
in my own damn field right among my
carefully tended crop circles (some
of which are more oval than round
but whatever)
here in middle between the light
of the stars and the dim glow of
my
porch lights – and they’re interested
in ME by God, and in Brownie and Rex
too, but mainly in me, they can tell
I’m the dominant species around
here I guess
and they’re all gangly and eyebally
and alien-looking as hell and they have
long toes and necks and foreskins
intact – could be they come from an
unhygienic planet or maybe they
regenerate willy-nilly, who knows,
but I’ll ask them once they’ve scanned
my brain and learned to speak
American and now they’re touching me
all over with their finger suckers
and it feels nice – and son of a bitch
they take me inside the ship, we’re
going up, space is calling, the moon fills
the porthole all bulgy and off-white
and who the hell’s
going to believe it,
I’m pinching my own butt cheek
but I’m weightless now and they say
they’ll let me piss out the porthole
so I can watch my piss droplets freeze
and boil at the same freaking time –
and let’s face it,
it just don’t get any better than that.
FORCED LANDING
Hope abandoned
forced to put down on a dark planet
vertigo
constantly shifting gravity
inky immunity to instrumentation.
We hurl ourselves out through
the airlock
lie gasping
and retching on an endless plain
of night.
And then
when the dark people finally come
as we knew they would
no resistance
we follow them into the night
to the place where
magnetic shadows sleet down
from above
scorch the unseen surface
with pitch-black incandescence.
Bio: Jeffrey Park's poetry has appeared most recently in Mad Swirl, Crack the Spine, Dark Edifice, and the new 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.
