THE GREAT DISCONNECT

The great disconnect

The modern home's technology,

Surpasses Houston's haughty glory,

More science in a  mobile phone,

Than brought the lunar heroes home.

Where has your

Mighty Cape of super heroes gone?

Where now your island of the Titans?

Forbidden, verboten!

To we mere mortals,

Yet in the Land of the Free

Talos like your,

Statue of Liberty,  

Looms over all,

In its limitless generosity,

Welcoming Nazi refugees,

To blast the bellows of Vulcan's forge.

Technology rich in tinted Ray-Ban excess,

Hackneyed Press-Corp hacks,

Covet the cake-stand coiffured wives who,

Ornament slick haired men with serious faces,

Slick lives, slick cars, slick homes, slick pools,

Slick talk in the land of shtick,

Tick-tock,         

Check their wristwatch,

From the confines of convertibles,

Camped around the circling swamps,

Earth’s present preferred master-race,

Await celestial countdown.

Nearby. where advert hoardings herd,

Round, endless realms of real estate,

The stench of road-kill chokes the air,

Carrion and pink gum mosaics

The twenty-seventh state,

Splatters like cartoon blood.

Pop!  

Jaws drop in awe,

Before the distant turret towers,

From which the rocket powers to

Leave primeval pull of Earth,

Jet stream scream,

Birds fall silent,

Boosters steam,

In the distance,

In midstream.

Alligators feign indifference.

Where is your bronze-tanned God that met his fate,

Too late, late, late, the season of the year?

In gun toting Texas's,

Deepest heart,

Lover of Frost,

And Monroe.

Graves gives no account,

Of deities dying by the  sniper’s sudden

Sting.  

Pop, splat, magazine art,

The fallen God forever explodes in a haze of gory,

Super-8 reels away from the terror of that day,

Unfolds the tragic fall of venal yet great men,

Of deities dying amid the public glare,

Upon the winding plains and grassy knolls,

Look on y’all ye mighty and take great care.

To whom you speak, if witness to such strange events.

Where is your Arthur?

Sailed on to Avalon and left his tearful,

Guenevere  and Camelot a state,

And yet his dead-hand guides the levers still,

Oh captain! my captain!

The dead-hand sanctions the thrust and drive,

Towards the holy grail,

Of a country that space cannot contain.

Houston and that bubble-gum world laid now bare,

Traduced the tiny square through which,

A squinting world could see through sets,

The mighty three,

Make history,

That took one giant step etc. etc.

Way back in sixty nine,

Events so very black and white as when the UK,

Staying up all night, in fairness fuelled as much by fright,

As curiosity, that perhaps we had,

Disturbed some sleeping alien-race,

When in effect, we had disturbed, a sleeping desire,

By the dawn’s early cathode-light,

Something to inspire, embedded in,

That trinity, footprint annealing, surface memory,

So once profound, space bound,

Soundless trumpeted,

An era of exploration,

And heightened expectation,

Across the nations of the world.

They travelled in their god-named tube,

Argonaut or astronaut,

Theseus and Jason would approve,

Pandora like, Prometheus was unboxed that night,

Earth shattering moment we all shared,

Huddled around our tiny cube,

Unlocked, we raised our heads above,

The rat-run mazes of

Our troubled-lives, and for one moment,

Re-found our dreams re-read the stars, and

Aping our ancestors,

Stared in awe.

I was four.  

By seventeen, the seasons and the seventies had turned to fall,

The world switched off indifferent.  The grail lay rusted,

The  gravity of mistrust had crushed the poet heart,

Icarus crashed into the ground, shaken to the core,

Earth hoarded all her heroes for her own,

Her wayward children, firmly grounded in her home,

And alien accountants landed and spake only of costs

And bribed the temple-guards, to look the other way,

While they stole the treasures we had shared,

And gave them to their only kin,

The money-lenders and their money spending whores,

And built a calf of gold to worship, to

Polish and admonish those that,

Would not share their ways,

And false gods forbad  self-sacrifice and society,

And false gods mocked

Public duty and the common cause,

And false gods bade us dream only of 
Things that hands could hold,

And mouth could chew and drool its 
Crudest wants so visible,

Our sights dragged down from starlit hope,

Dreams tilted, tumbled, crashed, in smoke,

Dreams bought and sold by bears and bulls.

The blinded people’s heavy hearts,

Punctured, burst and leaden, led,

Helot like, in chains, the yoke,

Re-borne, the social contract broke,

Mission over, vision dead.

In agoras not yet conceived,

This tragic tale they will unweave,  of

How we lost the sense in why,

However hopeless it may seem,

We must always share the dream,

However distant, however high,

We must, stretch and strain and try,

To reach and touch,

The ever stardust-pregnant sky.

Stephen Evans 2014