"FOR CHRIS PINE" BY FRANK O'HARA

"A leaving word in the sand, odor of tides: his name"
— Thinking of Chris Pine

Chris Pine
headliner
reared in USA
is capable of everything
some success

Purporting to know what
ingeniousness is? it's
no-one beyond this world — Jim
ever not being unearthly 

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.

THE FOUNTAIN

It is only water and it only holds
you long enough to toss a coin
between its jets and wish if magic's
what you believe in, and you believe
the cosmos at that moment
will turn its megatons of matter
in your direction like a radio
telescope in the Mexican dustpan
bleeps messages to little green men
who answer in pig–latin code, 
they are important friends and wish
you peace. You tell me so.
It is only water and it only holds
you long enough to toss a coin.

SPACE INVADERS

for SM

The docile turds that curl from under skirting boards

at night, then labour round the carpets and laminate

like ponderous, fecal figure skaters, are pernicious,

though they seem dumb. I catch them by the fridge,

investigating seals with probing stalk-eyes, hunting

weaknesses in pizza boxes left in slime's reach.
Aliens, that come from Mars to drain the juices

of your fruit and veg, may slither by your genitals

as you sleep. You will know they've been by morning,

when a semen slick is pooled around your thigh

Their vapour trails that start and end at nothing are a threat:

you never saw me coming and will never see me leave.