“Your Future and Mine” by John Grey

Space is so overdeveloped, so cluttered,

this trip is like an obstacle course.

The new frontier?

Not when soda bottles orbit planets.

Solar systems are junkyards.

Knowledge is yesterday’s raison d’etre.

We search to find new dumping grounds,

for trash, for people.

Yet here I am,

passing a prison ship on my left,

a supply rocket on my right.

I’m scouring scrap metal worlds,

dodging drunken wedding reception meteors,

blasting through giant rings of foam peanuts.

As a boy, I dreamed of being the first

to set foot on Abelard or Plato.

Now, I’m delivering spare parts

to those two blowsy, smelly, polluted planets.

I land in muck,

trudge streets of sewage.

I choke, I cough, I spit my way

by some fenced-in Sodom

guarded by vicious three-headed dogs

to the shabby office of a two-bit

rocket repair shop.

“Your order’s here,” I hack

to some jelly-faced alien.

You can’t drink the water.

You throw up on the food.

And the women are as hard

as element 346 on the Periodic Table.

Yes, some of us do get what we wish for.

Goals contaminated, hopes infected,

aims and ends clogging up the space lanes —

our gratitude forgoes the usual routes.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in New Plains Review, Perceptions, and Sanskrit with work upcoming in South Carolina Review, Gargoyle, Owen Wister Review and Louisiana Literature.

Published in Kaleidotrope, Autumn 2015 | www.kaleidotrope.net