America Rocks the Red Planet

ON Saturn's Day
We embarked
Six Trillion Dollars Deep
the trough we laid
across interplanetary distances
to the Red World.
We ate the freeze dried proteins,
monitored our investments
in the futures' markets,
engaged in disciplines (as) naval gunners
training—guns contained
but smoking.

At the end of a lunar cycle
280,000 miles closer to the red mine
due west of the solar disk,
Our Commander goes into Shock,
His Virgin Mother naked and helpless
in the tinny web of cloisonne,
cracks spreading from his schizophrenia.

We pat him down, vacuum the semen from his
airtight outfit—
He resembles Elvis, the thick drugged-out-on-speed
Living Corpse Elvis, still holy
but lost in his chalice of selfishness. At Some Point
Mission Control informs us
this Madness is predestined, planned by
the planners, and the Isis on his lap
is a projection of a personality
stronger than we average souls can interface:
Viva Las Vegas, come to life,
E.'s Mother, the Virgin, is Ann Margaret.
At nineteen She is prepared to give birth to all of us
but not to sleep with even Elvis—there is no need:
His seed is thick in all he does.
Our Captain possesses the necessary madness,
coining all the realms in all the cubic emptiness
we cruise each 24 hour cycle.

We got to the Planet of Ore, Mad Elvis Our Jesus,
driving hard in the CIA's store-bought Cadillac,
cruising on high we took the top 27 feet of Mars,
and process it, and take it home to those most corrupt
on Earth where it will become an electromagnet
of Power: the field generator of their dreams.

This millenium, this hidden forest, belonging to those
so rich they have no laws nor land ... these words
now grains of sand on the great Martian Plain
the prayer comes:

We take the worlds, each in its order,
as JHVH ordained, using Elvis as our frontman,
driving him mad—Our Sacrifice, Our Trowel.

Sure if I could only tell you
all that has happened this night, perhaps we could
return to what was once Ground Zero
the Noise so common now we cannot hear it
anymore.


(From the early 1990s. I've always obsessed on the Elvis movie, Viva Las Vegas, because as ridiculous as it is it becomes something more than a bad story with some rock stars in it. At some point when Elvis and Ann Margaret are "dating" in the storyline, it becomes suddenly like a document from Mount Olympus. They become two creatures representing the circle in its deitific form. It doesn't seem to matter, the space and time of it. In any case this is a dark, weird piece, coming from the Reagan years.

This was written well before the tragedy on 9/11, 2001, so the Ground Zero reference shocks a little at this date. Crazy stuff. Reminds me of Cordwainer Smith's work. He was a strange sci-fi writer who was close to poetry in his long concepts and language. He grew up a diplomat's son in China and used what he learned in those early years to give us a future history lyric and dark, yet full of hope. He re-imagined several major xtian myths in light of a much older world. Particularly the legend of Jean d'Arc.)