This blog is devoted to a select group of poets. We're starting with poets from the Ann Arbor area, but, hey, if you're from Detroit, Grand Rapids, Saginaw or the Upper Peninsula, then that is okay, too.
Our
goal is to provide you with a prompt every day from which you are to
garner inspiration and submit a poem. How to submit will be very easy.
Just put your poem or short story in the comments section and hit
post. You may not immediately see your post, but it is there under the
"Comments" section. You may need to click on "Comments" to see your
poem. It is there on another page.
You
may need to have a Gmail account to post in the comments section. Most
of you do have Gmail, but for those of you that don't it's extremely
worthwhile to open up one now! That way you've got a chance to get your
work out there in the world.
Launching From Bay 23
ReplyDelete(posted in multiple parts because of character limits in comments)
"Relax," she said. "Most of your kind come through this with a minimum of physical and emotional scarring." I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes. Her fingertips rested on my temples and she pressed lightly. It reminded me of the way my husband used to massage away my headaches. Or the way the zorks on Alpha III implanted my old memories after I'd damaged my shillock.
My apprehension was melting away. I could see the thick greenish liquid turning to a clear blue in the 3rd cylinder - the one that indicated my mood. The clear liquid in the 2nd tube started glowing a weak read. Excitement! Yes, I felt it. Not quite the same excitement I'd felt when I first read about "earth", but something close. I looked at will-be-called-Sarah in the seat next to me.
"You ready?" I asked her. I needn't have asked. Her eyes were bright, her face beaming. "Like a child on Christmas morning", in the vernacular of the planet we were going to visit next. It had all been her idea. The last three implants - "incarnations" is a better term this time around, "humans" are essentially made of meat - had been my choices. They were good choices, but Sarah guaranteed me that a "lifetime" on "earth" was the most exciting kind of implant she'd been able to find.
"They see through these little holes in the front of their tops," she'd said, showing me pictures. "And they get sick and they get better. They experience happiness and love like we do, but they also have something called 'fear' and 'fright' and 'anxiousness'. They are locked inside 'bodies' and have to move their entire 'bodies' around with them when to go from place to place. But best of all, they have 'needs'."
I didn't understand that. Being purely spiritual beings, we have no needs. The closest I could imagine to a 'need' is the drive we have to periodically implant our consciousness into other locations, trans-dimenationally or across vast regions of space. It's the only way we have of obtaining 'experiences' - a word I'd learned several implants ago on a moon of Xy%4BB.
This time on "earth" was going to be quite an adventure. One particular group of sentient beings there -- most of the planet is sentient but few of the higher life forms recognize it in each other -- has intuited that realms like ours exist. According to what I've read, they would call us "spirits" or "angels" and locate our "realm" as "the Pure Land" or "the Shadow World" or "the Bamboo Grove". They have a curious tendency I want to study while we are there. They often create TWO(!) of these worlds, then assign one as a "good" place and one as a "bad" place. Then, they invent elaborate rituals and entire conceptual schemes to figure out who goes where. It sounds quite hilarious except that they are so deadly serious about it.
Launching From Bay 23 (post part 2)
ReplyDelete"Let's go over your agreement one more time, shall we?" the voice asked. We both nodded.
"will-be-called-Sarah will implant into a family in New England, America as a female human. Her body will be very broken and she will live her entire life in marginal health." She stopped there and turned to will-be-called-Sarah. "You certainly have a pattern, don't you?" will-be-called-Sarah nodded and smiled. "It keeps me humble," she said.
She turned the page and looked at me. "And you, will-be-called-Michael, signed up for the Surprise Package with conditions that you and will-be-called-Sarah meet and become friends, that you, let me see," she turned back to her notes, "'fall in love and get married', and that you have two beautiful offspring so you can experience what they call 'fatherhood'." I nodded. I'd read quite a bit about 'fatherhood' and was eager to try it. I'd read fiction, non-fiction, research, a variety of the types of documentation we had available about "earth" and its customs.
"All right, then, at the count of five, I'm going to throw the switch, are you ready?"
will-be-called-Sarah and I both took a deep breath and nodded.
-- for my friend Sarah Victoria Lewis (1945 - 2011). We kicked ideas like this around regularly --
- Mike Fedel
May, 2013