Making art
Why does God create the artist's soul?
Who, tortured, turns it inward
to reflect whether there is a god
and wonder why He made her
And struggles to sow in meager earth.
Would it not be better to be a dreamless laborer
who wipes the brow and returns home to sleep
And does not think of the machine till they wake
Or the doctor
Whose hand daily wields life and death
And who accepts both as our ends
Or the astronomer
Who tries to calculate what God cast in words
And falls upon infinite paradoxes,
But makes abstractions fathom the sky?
All these eat the honest returns of their effort
But the artist strives long to produce little
Or short to manufacture much
but derives only fleeting mania from her toil, and has no satisfaction
And must ape the motions of the other workers all the while
enduring the scorn of all
Till she dies in the same dust
with not half to show to her name.
Two’s Company
Linda Whelan’s journey into space began typically for a dead person.
The funeral was cheap; the cookies and the hired reverend both a bit stale. Linda lay in state in her bargain casket, which the Beyond Horizons Funeral Fleet advertised as their economy model with a 99.8%* vacuum-proof seal. Linda wore her black skirt suit and gold earrings and a pair of tights that very nearly ended the undertaker’s commitment to her professional demeanor when she crammed them onto Linda’s mottled yellow legs. In the two hundred and sixty odd years since the invention of seamless tights, nobody thought to manufacture a version compatible with cadavers.
With all the tears wiped and the lid sealed, the undertaker closed the door to the airlocked evacuation chamber. Linda’s son pulled the lever for the release, and Linda slid neatly out on a stately trajectory out from the Milky Way. Her exit ended the workday, so the undertaker wiped her brow and hurried off to find a drink. The extended family trailed into a reception room to eat the cookies and complain quietly about the cost of terrible coffee on funeral vessels. And Linda clipped along toward the twelfth sector at about ten meters per second.
Once she passed the furthest settlement, a beacon in her casket would ping, activating a forty second jet propulsion to speed her journey into the stars. The ping would tell Beyond Horizons that she’d successfully cleared civilized space. It would also officially divest them of any liability regarding the casket. If Linda’s relatives had purchased the more expensive release package, a tracker would trace her journey, and possibly a camera would display the front row seat view into the great beyond. But Linda’s relatives decided that there would only be a lot of empty black nothing, and so the ping was just insurance for the funeral company.
Linda never pinged.
Instead her tour of sector twelve encountered a rude interruption. A sudden jostle disarranged her folded hands from her chest, although it did not disturb the firmly fixed white curls of her hair. Her casket jarred to a stop and then, sacrilegiously, opened.
Something flopped onto her still body. A foot kicked Linda in the nose, and teeth clacked against her patent leather shoes. A curse profaned the opened tomb, and a stuffing motion occurred, during which Linda obligingly disarranged to admit a second foot and a pair of arms. The lid crushed back down, albeit with a now less than a 99.8% perfect seal. A frenzied scraping rattled the crowded box, and a loud series of blows obliterated the beacon and took another percentile out of the gasket.
A long wait occurred—one meaningless to Linda, who had all the time on or off Earth. After that came one more heavy lurch, as though someone had kicked a solid boot against the casket, sending it back adrift.
Linda continued on her way, unperturbed, with her new companion’s shoes in her hair.
Flight Risk
He leans close,
Silken fold of opulence
A wink of bold immune impudence
I could be just another small imprudence
He confides.
Wrinkled hands that dole dollars
To cover priceless crimes
And smooth the air to soothe the anxiety
Beneath kindly crinkling eyes.
I could be priced less than his ticket.
This tick, it reminds me
Of my own grandfather’s face
Even for a fate worse than death
Only death can pay.
“She calls me an offender
Say anything and you’ll offend her—
One of those unreasonable types.”
Is reason able to act here?
With princes and presidents and actors?
We want justice
Or just his head on a pike.
Folded arms and tight smiles
Tight airline aisles
And silence that screams no
My sigh lends no hint.
"What do you think, prosecutor?
She’s cute, her
Underage body barely developed
Bare and developed on film."
Fight or flight or freeze, revelation too risqué
For the public
Records sealed and not published
He’s a flight risk; it’s too risky.
He’d flee somewhere with no extradition
(Underage is just an ex tradition
Really not even antiquity.)
So he’ll quit the world no wiser
Unrepentant
Of a penchant
We know was not just his.
We know was not justice.
A solitary death can’t touch this crime.
Wheels kiss the airstrip
It’s his last trip
He smiles at some underage woman
The last time.