There is science fiction in my blood,

pushing with a satisfying squelch

a prequel to a reverence hushed.

We are coming, overcoming

the highly evolved urge to vanish

into an unexplored ether that is 

 

neither blue nor turquoise, wouldn't dare

be white as the dwarf star lodged down in

the muscles of the throat that cannot 

pray; godless beneath the red sand, dust,

dirt storms raging -how deeply innate, how 

my heart stirs its eyes skyward, downward,

 

deep into dark birthing waters, that it breaks

molecularly, atomically -anatomically it is the same.

 

Cry just hard enough at the human condition

that I can believe it is alien as I comfortably sit

behind glass pages; brittle, old warnings

teetering in a dollar ninety-nine stink 

on a back shelf for forty-nine years.

 

Expectations of grandeur, lifting off,

promises of far away suns -a princess

of some rundown, up and coming space 

junkyard floating between dead men's wishes 

made far too long ago from some terrace 

overlooking earthly pleasures as common as 

the dimestore novel and even now the message is lost.

 

Turning up round faces, brown as sunflowers

soaked in burnt Martian honey; dipped from extended 

silver spoons, watching color screen, flat screen, 

non-terrestrial, non-existent existences floating down

to saturate the skin in a forgotten static of rainbows

just so that somebody could catch a word of the news.

 

I want to be the rocket man; feminine and choking

on nuclear stardust baked in the heat of a house wife's muffin tin.

The one that bakes itself, but always forgets to turn off the kitchen

light, while she sits out front debating Neptunian fairytales

and how they compare to what the good book said, when good books

mattered and she still lived on First street, still a girl, never still.

 

I want to be the rocket man, with a thicket of darkness

to spill over, running oiled fingers through my starless hair;

breathing decaying ozone and metallic matter through the nose,

so that I may exhale a foreign language against curved glass

protecting my mouth from tomorrow; swelling the blind sockets

with sun golden apples, sweet and rotting.