Line Breaks & Other Violent Crimes

—Jhal Arn, Emperor of the Mid-Galactic Empire 200,000 years in the future, to John Gordon, twentieth-century time traveler, in Edmond Hamilton’s Return to the Stars

In my time we shook hands.
We shook—in fear; in the sweet
depleting tremor following sex.
In my time we shook hands,
stabbed backs, held heads high,
girded loins, and gritted teeth,
we never dreamed this bodyspeech
would ever change, but that was our
presumption: nobody dances the quadrille
any longer, and few of us
play mumbletypeg. Spittoons
are scarce, and serious genuflection.
Who are we, to claim a version of eternity
for the high-five?
In my time, we “gave the finger”: [      ].
This was the “cuckold sign”: [      ]. And this here,
making a little pare-the-apple motion in the air
alongside your temple: [      ]: “he’s crazy.” In my time
we were crazy; how about yours? We really thought
the oxygen and the oil and the waters had
renewal-magic written in their molecular code,
but we were wrong. Some of us wore helmets
shaped of tinfoil, to repel the brain-invasion rays
from Mars; and some of us believed the second
marriage would be effortless, we’d learned
so much from the uselessly steaming engine
of the first. We wept—presumably
you weep? You hold your head in your hands
as if you’re considering bowling it down
the alley of broken hopes? Or have you
somehow evolved past bowling
and sorrow? What do you do
for laughter? Do you “hold your ribs”?
Or “slap your knees”? In my time
there was laughter, still. Its eye-rhyme
“slaughter” was plentiful, but we laughed
in the painfully godforsaken crannies.
We made “the sign of the cross,” we thought
“outside of the box,” and we kissed asses.
In my time there was rhyme. I made a few
of those myself. We hugged. We gave
the “rump bump” and the “knuckle bump”
and the “booty shake.” That latter of course
was not indulged in by everybody.
In my time there were numerous times,
which passed in the hospital respirator ward
in ways unthought-of in the honeymoon suite
with its balcony doors agape to let
the nearby moon illumine the love
being made in a wash of sterling silver.
Maybe there were as many times as there
was us. In “my” time in my time,
as I said, I dabbled away at “poetry,”
I took my time. I brought a book of many words
to an emptiness in my heart,
and I shook them out in there, to fill it.
In my time I wrote this very thing.
In your time you read it. 

Posted at 10:43am and tagged with: albert goldbarth, poetry, one column,.