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Ken Champion

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Planet Earth

Tiny tents in a hawthorn'd garden
springing up in the dusk like mushrooms
as teenage astrophysicists, laptops dancing to the skies
and grinning amidst whoops of accomplishment,
pinpoint Soyuz 10's satellite cluster,
while the rest of us, watching from the candlelit stable,
put on party faces and politely search
for food and drink we can recognise.

I take my beer to the kitchen where wineinhand starmen
drift brightly in with a darkhaired PhD
her eyes daring me to impress.
A born iconoclast, I set out to destroy science.

I flashily intellectualise, theorise, satirise, realise
that the young sci-fis have stopped tweeting defensively
and are departing to their canvas cosies
leaving me to tear apart paradigms for the non-impressed,
who is joined by her drunken lover bowing mockingly
before ushering her away to lie with
for what remains of the night,
and not to hear my rants echo across the land.

Later, coffee-filled, I trudge home through the dark,
jealousies and fears growing in the fields.
Springing up like mushrooms.

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