for John Shirley
We have a sick fascination with alien invasion
because our imagination forces a projection.
It's like jumping at a reflection from an ego-mirror
or receiving a fright from a trick of the light.
Something about the Fermi Paradox just ain't right.
But it's not an error in our mental processing:
it's more like natural insulation against being terror-
struck by the revelation of our real situation,
lost in space; our faces would turn blue, not from
lack of oxygen, but paralyzation of our nervous system
backpedaling to fix the nightmare that's no illusion.
To prevent further confusion, we may rest assured
and take my word that our greatest fears are merely
hopes in disguise once again transmitted from our eyes
and bouncing back as a cosmic echo location
to thicken the cushion and lessen the impact
of knowing there ain't jack out there but us
staring back in the flowering form of radio waves
withering in the trade-off of our mutual states
of existence for instance at my insistence
if we want to go the distance we must relax
and stop thinking to make first contact with
every extra terrestrial race in this entire place;
for you see, that's the fundamental problem:
we've erased comprehension that all remains one
thing in this dimension so keep on dreaming
harder about the possibilities in our back yard
or else come to face the electromagnetic certainty
the universe splits into a refracted spectrum
fixed into motion by the quantum computer
of a brain that seems adrift in this ocean of space
we process from behind the masks of our face.
