Return to the sky

I know when

the mothership returns

that I will be one of the ten thousand

who are raised up and taken away.

I don’t know

how I know I will go, but it’s something I know in the marrow.

I don’t know

how I know

there will be ten thousand taken, but

I knew the number when I saw the ship blot out the sky.

Since I was a boy, I’ve known

I would be off into the stars at some point,

I just don’t know

when

or how

or what it might look like.

I don’t know much, to be honest,

about the return,

not when it will happen,

or what it will look like,

or even what kind of signs to expect.

But I know it will happen.

There are and have been all kinds of forerunner cults giving this kind of thinking a bad name,

and I understand that

and

it’s important

to know

I don’t think

anyone needs to die for this to happen,

I don’t think the world needs to end

for them to return.

I think,

like a lot of things in this world,

that it will be when it is

and what will be, will be,

and I also think there will be a lot of fear.

Yes, I will go with that ship

but I will be leaving behind

my friends,

my family,

my partner,

my dog,

my job,

all the things that I love

and for what?

I don’t know.

I just hope it isn’t trading one world of pain

for another world of pain.

Orbs in the night

The first time,

the only time,

I saw those glowing orbs

in the sky

I didn’t know what to think aside from

maybe

they are UFOs,

and I told everyone what I saw.

I told them how fast they moved,

how their colours didn’t look like they belonged

with the colours I thought belonged in the sky—

like I have any clue what does or doesn’t belong anywhere,

least of all up there—

how the way the orbs moved just didn’t seem like anything

I’d ever seen before.

Most everyone I told

had a good old laugh about it,

asked me how much I’d had to drink,

or where they could get what I was smoking.

I said I hadn’t been drinking and that,

in my experience,

smoking grass didn’t yield visual hallucinations; 

I got a lot of eye rolls,

a lot of scoffing,

a lot of sure-buds,

a lot of whatever-you-says.

Who knows.

Maybe everyone else is right and I’m wrong.

I know that’s a possibility

because all I did was look up and

see something I’d never seen before.

Maybe 

I just imagined it all

but I don’t think I did.

People believe in gods and that’s

accepted,

encouraged even.

Believing in flying orbs, though,

believing it was something looking back down,

that’s something no one wants to think about,

not even if we know

if we

stare into the void

long enough 

something will stare back.

I haven’t seen the lights again, but I know I will.

I believe it and I know it.

Staring up at the sky

When I was a boy,

I stared up at the moon

and thought if it was that far away,

how far away everything in the sky must be.

When the first ship appeared in the sky beside the moon,

almost blocking it out,

I wondered how big it had to be if it wasn’t as close as the moon.

Sitting on the same patch of grass now as I did back then

gives me a lot to think about,

helps me understand that nothing matters.

Nothing means anything.

In a blink,

the ship could fire its lasers again

and turn everything to dust,

just like they did when they turned the Rockies to rubble.

I remember the first time someone said to me

they could just vaporize us if they wanted,

they could just turn us into yesterday’s news,

debris floating through space,

a cloud of dust where a planet used to be.

I wish that I could still be that little boy

who stared up at the sky

and dreamt about how every dream could be possible

and how every dream could come true.

I wish I could still be the little boy

who didn’t know that if

he wanted dreams to come true

then he also needed to accept

nightmares could come true, too.

Bad dreams existed just as much as good dreams.

More than that, I wish I could stop staring up at the sky all night.

Waiting and waiting

At first,

space was beautiful.

Delicate aloneness, 

overwhelming in its cold serenity.

20 years ago,

I remember thinking for the first time

that

I would never

be able to describe it properly or succinctly enough.

20 years in,

space is still beautiful, but

I never thought beauty and placidity and serenity could be so backbreaking.

I thought I knew what I was signing up for

when I signed up.

When the monolith appeared in the sky and took

a billion people away

before disappearing

the rodeo of humanity changed

and, as a result,

I am on a lifetime mission near Saturn

to wait,

to watch,

to send word

if the invaders ever come back,

like there would really be anything we could do if they come back.

A billion people they took away 

as quickly as I can snap my fingers,

smoking holes

the only things left for

anyone

to know

someone had even been there.

And here I am,

hoping my alarm,

if it ever be raised,

might send some sort of signal back home to run for the hills.

Ships appearing in the sky,

you blink,

a billion gone

and my call home could prevent it

a second time.

Right.

Knowing I am the harbinger of doom

gets

heavier

every 

day.

Still, 

maybe lovers can kiss one last time,

a parent could hold their children.

I worry about missing something,

or sleeping through the wrong blip or bloop

or misunderstanding a heat signature

or even still feeling connected to everyone down there.

I am out here to watch out.

I am removed from it all.

To most, I exist beyond the beyond.

In some ways,

my name has already faded

from memory

because I am gone and I am never coming home.

I will never see anyone ever again.

In another 20 years,

maybe my journal will have finished transmitting 

and I will be remembered,

there is that chance.

There is also the chance that

something goes wrong

and I am transmitting to nowhere

and I have already faded beyond anonymity.

A ghost of a ghost of a ghost

sitting out here and staring out at Saturn.

I am the only one 

who is thinking about me

and I wonder if that even makes me real anymore.

If I think and move and breathe,

but I am never

felt

or

seen

or

heard

or

touched

then does it even matter if I think?

Does it even matter what I say 

about beauty and serenity?

Does it matter if a ghost screams?

Time travel

My parents are from a planet so far away

that it’s almost impossible

to understand the distance.

There are so many zeroes in the number of light years

that the universe doesn’t seem 

big enough

for that amount of time to be crossed,

but, somehow,

my folks did it.

They didn’t last long when they got to Earth,

and their passing wasn’t because they couldn’t adapt

to the atmosphere or to the life and sustenance 

that grows here, but

rather

because they were so tired they couldn’t go on.

When they passed,

I mourned them

for days and

for weeks

and for months

and for years.

It was hard for me

to wrap my head around time and space

and to consider life as following the same path.

I couldn’t understand

how if they’d travelled for a thousand years,

how only a few handful of years on Earth

could be the ones that wore them out.

I remember when they were dying,

they told me,

Henry,

life comes at us fast and

what we think of as time isn’t

really time at all.

We see time as one thing happening after another,

like there is some kind of sequence to it all,

and while there is in some ways,

in other ways there isn’t.

Sometimes it is just happening all at once

and our minds sort it all into a film reel

so we can understand what is happening.

They told me they travelled thousands of years

by reordering the snapshots of their lives and

now it was time to pay the price.

They told me 

anyone

can travel time,

but we are not built to withstand the temporal shock.

Our bodies break down 

and our minds get caught up in the nets of time

and we can drown in the past or the future

while our bodies die in the present.

They told me not to worry

about time

or time travel

and to just let it all happen.

Looking up

Looking up at night now,

I remember as a kid when

the mothership used to land in the backyard,

its lights obliterating the darkness.

I had a hard time then and

I still have a hard time now

believing

that ship and the scientists and explorers

came just to find me,

but they said they had, and

they said they came to let me know

so I could let others know.

They said they came to me and

to others like me so we could

know a different way of seeing

and

a different way of thinking

and of dreaming

and of loving

and of learning

and of discovering

and of accepting

and of understanding.

They said life would be hard

because the ways they would show me

were old ways

from beyond our way of understanding time

and

there would be many times when I would wish

they hadn’t visited me,

that they found another person in another backyard.

They told me they’d travelled distances

I couldn’t understand

to find the lights they saw

from an eternity’s breath away.

I always wanted them to take me up

and take me away with them

and

every time

I asked

they said they couldn’t.

I know it’s really that they wouldn’t,

not that they couldn’t.

Sometimes I wonder if they just needed to find someone

to make themselves feel whole.

Lost in space

When I was young 

I always got

astrology and astronomy mixed up

and never cared about the difference

everyone told me existed

between the two.

Since I have been up in the stars, however,

I have learned

how little difference there actually is

between

the

two.

I watched people spend their lives

arguing how one way of perceiving

is the right way and the only way

of understanding

how the stars ruled their lives.

I also remember when I was young and 

I used to tell people 

about who I wanted to be

and

how I wanted to be

and

how I wished I could engage with the world

and everyone always

laughed.

They called me a dreamer.

They never called me honest

for not saying

I want to get married

or

I want to have kids

or

I want to own a house and

and

and

and

and

and.

And what’s actually funny about this is that it isn’t

that I don’t want those things in some ways

or that I think those are the wrong ways

but it's the whole 

astronomy and astrology

thing.

I just want something different.

Since I have been living

in the stars

I have spent a long time

thinking

about

what life would look like

if I ever came back to Earth,

thinking a lot

if I told everyone

where I’d been and

if I told everyone

the things I’d learned

and had seen

and had heard

and had felt

and had thought

and had experienced.

I think no one would believe me.

I think everyone would want me to be the person they want me to be and not the person I am.

It isn’t my fault

I was taken up to the stars

when I was young and

there are a lot of times when it is

very lonely

up here

and I wonder

if there are other lost people

living on moons and asteroids and in the tails of comets

and I wonder if they are looking back at me.

I know there are some people

who will say 

that it's a common thing 

to look out and wonder if someone is looking back

and I understand and agree

in most circumstances.

If I am standing on Earth and looking up and

wondering

if someone else lives

on a planet like mine

and is looking back back out and wondering what I am wondering.

I think we can all agree

that is a possibility.

However,

how many people have been 

taken

from their homeworld 

and sent off along into space 

to live on a rock.

Is that a common thing,

intergalactically speaking?

All I know

is that astrology and astronomy both

have told me the same thing in two ways

and I believe them both because

if I don’t believe

then I am alone

staring into the void.

Looking down

Was it Arthur C. Clarke

who called Earth a pale blue dot?

Isaac Asimov?

Carl Sagan? 

I think it was Carl Sagan.

Did all of them think it and just one of them said it first?

Whoever said it was right.

Up here in the starship 

looking down,

it’s becoming clearer and clearer

to me that while Earth might have

at one time

been that pale blue dot,

it isn’t any longer.

From way up here,

floating in an organic metal ship,

the Earth looks like a caricature of itself.

Some funhouse mirror reflection

of what it once was,

at one time whole and beautiful,

supporting 

those who lived

in harmony with their surroundings.

I remember those years ago when the ship

first came and

the Travellers

first picked me up,

they were curious about humans.

They wondered why

we did all the things we did.

I told them—

like I am some kind of expert—

that we mostly had no clue

what we were doing.

Some of us try

to live the right way,

the slow way,

the long way,

the way that lets as much flourish at the same time as possible; 

at the same time,

there is the threat of being

crushed

under the boot heels

of those who want everything

now,

who want everything 

their way,

who want to build an altar upon which they can

sacrifice everything

to themselves.

The Travellers asked me what I thought

sacrifice meant

and I told them

I thought it meant to give things up for the greater good

and they told me

I was close.

The Travellers told me

sacrifice means to take something mundane

and to

put our energy into it and doing so makes it sacred.

They told me 

what they saw 

was human sacrifice

to gods of our own creation.

The Travellers told me

they’d been watching humans

for years—

THEIR concept of years—

and found all kinds of people believed

all kinds of wild ideas,

but no one wanted to

really believe something that isn’t their god

could be looking back down

and judging them.

Abduction/Surgery

The light in my eyes

keeps me

from seeing much of anything,

from feeling anything but fear.

I can’t even feel my body.

I try and believe

my arms and legs are intact

because that was the case when I put my head down.

The little I can see at the fringe

of the light’s halo

looks like a surgical suite.

Cold.

Steel.

Sterile.

Chittering and clicking

outside the halo tells me someone is lurking,

and more than just someone.

I know what’s happening.

I can feel it without feeling a thing.

On the fringe,

I see 

long, fragile fingers

attached to elegant hands

attached to delicate arms.

I can see

the oval-shaped heads,

the big eyes

sitting over two slits for a nose,

and a slit for a mouth.

All of it feels like I am awake

and none of it

feels like I am asleep.

The sound of the buzzsaw tells me this is now.

The feeling of it biting into my arm just above my elbow

confirms to me this is now.

I am shrieking.

I am hearing another saw at my knee.

I am feeling the bite of the blade.

My blood spatters out.

My intact body

is no longer 

my intact body.

My arm is being pressed beneath my knee,

my leg beneath my elbow.

I smell 

burning hair

and burning skin.

The cold of the saw presses against my belly.

I smell urine and feces.

Is this what it is to be taken in the night?

Is this what it is to be some sort of experiment?

Is this the fear an animal feels

when they are put to the knife or to the test?

I am helpless.

I am voiceless.

I am awake through it all.