T Jones.
Man my mother has the eyes of a hawk.
Bangs.
My forehead will become the solar system of pimples.
In case pigs fly.
There won’t be anymore I can say
Anymore I can do
The world will reach its limit
And you’ll say you love me, too.
Remember what everyone told us?
How we’d never reach any higher than we stand?
Well, here’s to hoping pigs fly
As long as I simply hold your hand.
Satan has taken over heaven,
Earth has collapsed to glitter,
The sun has set on the east today,
only for air to taste so bitter.
You said you’d remember me.
Darling, you said you would.
How come pigs are flying,
and you never did what you said you could?
I confessed I loved you
with no expectations in mind,
but the sun is setting
and the stars have finally aligned.
I wanted to change the world.
I wanted to change the world, but instead I decided to eat it. I guess it started with my mother begging me to take my cough syrup this morning, and ended with a brilliant plan. There was no turning back from there.
My eyes squint now, every time I turn to look at the sun. I ate the world, you see. There was nothing else I could do. Reality came at me too soon before my brilliant plan was even launched. I didn’t react quite as I wish I had. I took too much at once, and swallowed it whole. Now I’m sick to my stomach and Mars doesn’t look too appetizing.
The townspeople, I hear them crossing streets and driving cars inside me. They immigrate from Turkey to India to Libya to China. I feel them waging war with one another, and I don’t have the slightest idea of how to stop them.
My mother’s cough syrup would be unnecessarily useful right about now.
These souls live inside me, probably in a constant darkness of their new universe with only my own belly button as the source of light.
You may think that sitting too close to the sun has finally led me to talk nonsense. Maybe I have gone bad—I won’t deny it—but I ate the world. Only because I wanted to change it.
“…If you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, p. 6
