. The Poet's Beat .

. The Poet's Beat .

Friday, February 8, 2013

Patty

A poem about the people we meet, and the side of them we'll never know, unless, of course, we happen to be one of their targets designated for elimination to ensure a stable balance of some far flung future catastrophe. Keep up - this one jumps all over time and space... 


2012
She let’s her fingers dance so that her mind can sleep
So that she can quiet the screams
So that she can forget the child she left behind
The hour is late and she is numb
Smoking a cigarette
Gambling away the pennies of a foreign president
Thinking long on the promise she’ll never keep
Her fingers flutter
Tap dancing over a digital display of bare breasts on the screen

She checks her watch which tells her it’s October 17th
A sad smile at the secret she’s had to keep
For them it’s the birthday of a friend
Although it is certainly when life on Earth for
her began
She shares our genes and is one of our race
But her truth actually started a very long time away
She was pushed from her mother’s womb in the depths of space
On a Hospital Ship orbiting the dead star Caul Dron 10
Though human her origins require a vaster leap

She sips the drink offered by a stranger because she’s cheap
Though she’d like to - she mustn't fall asleep
Smoke seeps from her nostrils and floats about her face
She scans the room
Those sharp eyes trained to see through haze
Her tightly wound muscles under a blanket of synthetic fat
A sleek modified blaster in the waistband of her jeans
She has not yet healed and feels no shame
This target tonight is number two hundred and sixteen

10002012

“Why must you go?” her son asked beneath the sheets
Outside the view hole the black star and the last remaining human fleet
She smiled at the boy but refused to cry
There was more to fear than the ship’s reinforced steel and concrete
Ten thousand years after the last man left Earth

There were no more cigarettes
There was no more whiskey
“But I’ve never heard of that planet”, said her boy
“You will”, she said,
“It’s just that our memory is incomplete”

2012

She chose her path just as she chose that bar seat
She chose her path because the sun was a dying source of heat
In a world where the air smelled heavily of nitrogen
Humans fucked for pleasure again and again
And cars did not fly but were stuck to the street
She inhaled the last of her cigarette
This insufferable city of Lafayette
Watched her target stumble through the exit
She paid for another drink and signed the receipt


10002012
They called to tell her that she had ten minutes before the jump hole would close
     and her chance to save humanity be obsolete
She kissed her son on the forehead and told him to go back to sleep
Memorized the smell of his hair
The touch of his skin on her lips
Though she was to leap across time and stars she knew that leaving that bedchamber would be her hardest feat
“Will you be back soon?” he asked
Confident as children are wont to be
“Of course,” she said with her saddest of smiles
“You’ll see”

2002

Ten years ago to the day she stepped into that bucket seat
Rebekah Octavius Rhendering 3.0 “Patty” Marquez fell from heaven in the bright glow of a comet streak
Landing on Earth in what was a one-way only leap
Behind her gray eyes a list of one thousand names
One thousand human males who carried in them a mutated gamete
They’re extinction would balance the sheets
Make history once again complete
If not for her
For a son born ten thousand millenniums later
Pulled from her loins by cold machines in the pediatric suite
She knew
she could never return
But that one day in the future they would yet again get the chance to meet


2012
She crushes out her night’s last cigarette
Primes the blaster on her hip
Before she turns to go she lifts her bloated hand to her lips
Leans over the bar and speaks into a hidden cassette
“Target number two hundred and sixteen
Carl Robertson just left.”

12.2012

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