IMAGINE THE MOON

Imagine being up there.
Imagine picking up handfuls of it.
The trip of a lifetime. 
Imagine the white cold sands
on the shore of the sea of tranquility.
Imagine losing fifteen stone
to weightless drifting. Imagine your ship
anchored to a meteorite cut crater.
Imagine the dark side.
Imagine the silence out there.
Imagine a telephone that never rings.

Think of a porch at midnight
in the country
without crickets or fireflies
and your muttering and clenching
and unclenching your fists.
Imagine the moon.
Imagine yourself imagining it.

SOMEWHERE LIKE THE MOON

i.m. Neil Armstrong

A palmful of moon-dust and rock opened my head

like a visor. My space-helmeted face exposed

to the vacuum; breath floating out my mouth in green

strata, drifting Northern lights to Saturn. I was puffs

of glittering powder scuffed from boot-steps and marine

in my leaps from one toe to the next, swimming through grease.

Who could have caught me? A helium swelled suit, a piece

of satellite junk bearing the hammer and sickle.

There is nothing out here in the desert. F-16's

gone to rust. The nose-cone of a boeing, crashed

on reconnaissance. The inferno gone out, ash

stains the sand with fuselage ghosts. Solar blown, 

I am somewhere like the moon, taking off my jeans

and shirt to shiver and yell, let the air prickle

my elbows and spine. I harden to graphite in ice drifts

that polish me. Diamond. An asteroid belt. Touchdown.

MOON RIVER

Moon River, wider than a mile,
That bastard is upstairs bathing again,
I'm crossing you in style some day.
while downstairs his children imagine his death.
Oh dream maker, you heartbreaker,
The soap and the lather bury his neck.
wherever you're going, I'm going your way.
If only the bastard would cut his throat.


Two drifters, off to see the world.
He slaps himself with vinegary cologne.
There's such a lot of world to see.


My mother remember's the way he dressed to meet her.
We're after the same rainbow's end,
And, after he'd cheat on her, he'd beat her
waiting round the bend,
and stumble into bed beside her
my Huckleberry friend,
and promise her


Moon River and me.