Look To the Skies

If there’s anything I like (and that’d be a long list for another day) it’s a sci-fi movie. That genre pretty much began in 1951 with The Man From Planet X and The Thing From Another Planet. Pretty soon film-goers couldn’t wait to spend a couple of hours with aliens who plan to enslave mankind, drain the earth’s resources then zoom off in their famous saucers leaving a ruined planet in their wake. Or -- shudder -- they want to take over our minds and bodies leaving us unable to choose between REI and L.L. Bean, Toyota and Chevrolet, Matcha Latte and Pike Place Roast.

A list of sci-fi films is a long and comprehensive; real fans know the different sub-genres -- Space Opera, Cyberpunk , Time Travel, and Hard Sci-Fi. I’m just going to name some of the classics: The Day the Earth Stood Still, War of the Worlds, Forbidden Planet, Them, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. and one of my recent favorites, Nope, by Jordan Peele.

A lot of ink has been spilled talking about the themes of sci-fi -- loss of humanity, colonialism, mind control -- but not much attention has been paid to the allure and incantation of their titles. Samuel Taylor Coleridge said that good prose was this: “Words in the best order.” Try these words -- The Day the Earth Slowed Way Down, Quarrel of the Worlds, Permissible Planet, Those, Invasion of the Body Borrowers, Yep. None would get me into the theatres. Okay, maybe Yep.

Today’s poem (mine as usual) honors the sci-fi genre and especially the B-movie category. The Speaker is an unusual alien. read on. You’ll see what I mean.

Bears from Space

Plastic honey bears on every table in every coffee shop.

Nanoparticles in the yellow nozzles send information

back to Constellation Ursa. Thousands of bears are on alert.

Our space ships stand ready.

When the bear-ships land – huge, monolithic, imposing --

humans will go to their knees. They will roll over and show

their fat, white stomachs.

Only one thing from coffee shop data is worrisome: most

hominids tip the little bear and squeeze. But a few rip

the bear’s hat off and dip a spoon into its skull.

This suggests a savagery that must be taken into account.

Perhaps earthlings are not as naked and puny as they appear.

This poem was fun to write and I remember – brace yourself for a fancy word -- its provenance: my local coffee shop. Usually I don’t like to work anywhere except at home. But I do like coffee with steamed soy milk. I’m waiting for the barista when somebody at a nearby table picks up a honey bear and says to his friend, “What a great place for nanotechnological spyware.” Bingo. I sat down and made a few notes on a napkin. The first few drafts weren’t promising: easy (aka dumb) jokes, FBI/CIA stuff, a noir shamus in a trench coat. But I still liked the idea of bears with a plan for world domination. In lots of sci-fi movies, humans are called “puny earthlings” and yet in film after film we prevail. Then one morning I saw an ad for toys, and one of those was Talking Teddy. Once I had a bear-narrator things got better faster.