Sit-coms From Other Planets
Sept 8 2009


The radio keeps me up-to-date on things.
The date
is 1990,
when I stopped paying attention.
Music was OK, back then —
disco dead
hip-hop, not yet invented.
The news, pretty much the same;
so once I got used
to war, disaster, starvation
I’d stopped hearing, anyway.

The announcer is smooth, breathless;
no less for lost pets
than bomb threats, pandemics.
In sports, someone’s worse, someone’s better.
And I can always look out the window
for weather.

There are acts of God, acts of Man,
and I’m not sure which are more hurtful.
But I know the first are easier,
because we can throw up out hands
proclaim ourselves helpless.
And the last
are too easy to blame
on someone else.

So I set the dial between stations.
They say the static hum
is left-over radiation
from the Big Bang,
the slow descent of the universe
toward absolute zero.
But who knows, perhaps
I’ll tune in to some inter-galactic chatter —
aliens, sending a message to earth;
extra-terrestrial girls
dishing juicy rumours;
sit-coms from other planets
reaching us eons after.

And the news from Utopia,
coming over the air
faint and crackly.
Which is what I’d hoped for, all along —
the perfection of Man
a benevolent God,
from a dim cluster of stars
not all that far-off.