Colony

The party over, not yet
the next day, the last hour,
4 a.m. without sirens.

Soon enough, the octopus sun will come rolling over the rusted hull of this world.  Neither silk sheers nor blue velvet drapes can obscure the penetrating gaze.  He is a voyeur from the deep.  The texture of this world will be displayed. 

Lakes of spilled liquor, sticky and almost frozen, lap up the pink and yellow of the coming light, a landscape settled by latex pods.  The weary balloons display the fickle buoyancy of air.  This lunar surface is punctuated by their crash sites, the breaking story:  There has been an accident at the edge of the Sea of Dreams.  

The screams, sopranic and hysterical, preceded the sputtering fall;  the once elegant dirigible now hurled out of heaven, retains only the vague memory of that shape.  They are the wrinkled scroti of the landings better abandoned, best forgotten, with worst remains.  

The helium would let you go further, higher, were the car not parked so close in its livery.  It is waiting for her.  She tripped so awkwardly:  the heal hooked so easily in the hem of her dress and her hand opened.  It was like one of those flowers that unfurl their petals, their fingers just at the moment that the sun's light arrives.  Then, the string slipped from her palm and the vehicle began to rise.

She looked up briefly.  The balloon was further now, lost, found.  A breeze from the restless east began to carry it.  Its blue surface--like our own home--began to merge with the night sky, with space, with the eternal.  Her drunken eyes registered the loss, small and yet complete in its tragedy.  The sun had done nothing to save her.