Men Sent Off Into Space

it was the year they sent men off into space

not to travel to the moon or Mars, rather

to journey the chasm between deafened ears

brains spilled wholesale into sinkholes

that swallowed the crenellated gray masses whole

some time after women burned their bras and

draftees flamed the fires with their draft cards

created a magic potion that showered one with fortitude

the other with hollowness and intemperate indifference

elephantine weight lifted from them, they

stripped themselves to roam the streets forlorn

in lumberjack shirts and droopy pants,

buttockless bumpkins in their colorful BVDs

astronauts of an earth without dreams,

thumbed clods fixated on monitors and screens

watching feckless selves meander inane highways

their own space

devoid of Aristotle and Archimedes

ancient medicinals for atrophying minds

now narcoleptic apes who deposit semen in jars

that year when descendancy laid a black shroud

on the peoplekind-carnival that

paid obeisance to sharing rhythms

instead, backseat beasts relegated to the earth

the others to missions beyond the stars.

--Sy Roth