PEOPLE OF EARTH

PEOPLE OF EARTH

PEOPLE OF EARTH

Whenever I discover what an idiot I’ve been,
           I turn to television — “Oh screen of wonders, flick me
                     on and off like an appliance,” I implore it
            and it answers back
and I cackle away in the aftermath
            of its buckets of canned laughter.
                       I lie on my little raft wondering
            whose abduction is this
anyway? “People of Earth, I have
            no intention.” Damned alien, chronic
                       master-plan — part of some system. I try
            to asphyxiate one last program, switch
to the contactees. Seems that in 1981 Debbie
            divorced and went to live with her parents
                      @ 32,000 kilometres per hour
            happy to show off,
push buttons, poke around
            the house for a while, hatching her evil plot.
                        She spoke, when she talked at all, Phooey.
            Most witnesses have the wit, but Debbie
received the phone call. “Hello, I’m Mrs
            Cleaveland.” It was a small, large-headed,
                       grey-skinned entity — guided, she said,
            by remote control by her little Maude, who,
once dead, made it safely to Mars. “My stars,
            they tell me, predict the weather” — but nothing
                      predicted whether or not she truly spoke
            the Martian language, a propellor-driven vessel
featuring flapping, inflatable wings that,
            suspiciously, Maude had taken off in.
                     “There’s this big ball of light,” she said.
            Did you believe her? Debbie did — she’d seen
the tarted-up guests and reporters being fed
            to the startled backdrop: it was aquamarine, like
                    Maude. But as this realisation dawned then bored her,
             whaddaya know, she remembered her plot —
and boy did that buck everybody up,
             bucked ’em up real good.