Midnite on Mars

Midinite on Mars

By

Derek Letsch

That We are Legal

I am living with my crime. It is the window and the desert and the empty space between where I am now and where everyone else used to be. And I am imagined. I am assembled. I am quiet and alone and the bones under my skin seem to vibrate with fear. I have been awake for days, but I know I have slept well in the past. My dreams were swollen in the heat of things. They skitter across the empty pages of the loosely held idea that we are allowed. That we are legal. That we are not alone.

Two Numbers

The hum and the flicker of the Warehouse lights remind us that life has a price tag. It might be glued to your sole or hanging from your neck, but they are numbers that we need to answer. There are numbers that wrap around us as binaries or as fake last names. And we hum inside the machine until the director tells us to be real. When are we real? When do we have air and life and thoughts and dreams and urges? When do we undress? When are we seen and then not seen and seen and then not seen as the day becomes night and the night becomes numbers.  One. One. Zero. One. And on and on and on and on…. 

I am no closer to you than I am to the center of the sun. Both are so hot. You will not touch me. I am emulsified. I am a chemical equation. I am an application. I am not even a hum or a flicker. I am alone beside you. I am you. You. You, you, me, you. And so on.

The Death of You

We are random. We are the things that grow on your body as you age. The things you don't care to understand until you know that you don't understand them, and you want to understand them so you travel. You visit the experts. You see the people who might know what these things are. These things that grow this way or that. They are different colors from the colors they started out as. The things that weren't there when everything started, but now they're there and you wonder if they'll be there in the end. Maybe they will be the end. Maybe they are the end. Maybe they are the death of you. Maybe they are you. Maybe you are dead. Maybe they are the homes and the buildings and the shelters that hide the cancer. They hide the disease. And you don't notice them. One by one. Builders come. Walls go up. Paint is applied. And then there is another. And another. And each one is a business. Or one of them is a home. Or one of them is an office for a government agency. They are sitting on your back or your shoulder or your elbows. They are little invaders. They are yours. They come from you. They grow from your skin, from your bones, from your body. And slowly they begin to cover the surface of your earth. Of your planet. Until what was once so clean and young is now overcrowded and overpopulated with valuable real estate that will one day likely mean your doom.

Clearing Lot

I celebrate clean living. The clean smooth surface of a parking lot that's barely used. All the painted lines, so carefully for absolutely no reason. And I am here, but I am not a car. I am still parked on another planet. I am too big. I am not shopped. I have not been sold. And yet I feel like maybe I have been. Because maybe I am just a product. Because somewhere out there he is making me. He is inventing me. He is producing me the way one produces anything that is considered a masterpiece. And yet I don't know if I'm a masterpiece. There aren't enough mirrors. There aren't enough men to compliment me at bars or in the cereal aisle where I have more choices than I have genomes. And while I might roll my eyes towards this moon, I do indeed enjoy the compliments. I enjoy the thought that maybe one might find a label on my heel or a price tag hanging from my neck and decide to string me up. To hang me. To place me on a tree in December or January or February. Maybe they'll forget to take me down. Maybe they'll forget that I'm even here. And I will orbit and orbit, slower than your planet circles our sun. And I will find a way to be far from the cars that park and stain the parking lot for the very first time in forever.

Beautiful Sunday

I have found myself once again trapped in the brilliance and the beauty of a beautiful Sunday, leaning into the spring day, staring at the shoe store. I am shopping. Here we are so safely stowed on an island in outer space that spins and spins. A planet so envious of Earth's proximity to the center. We are circled by fear and panic. It is not unusual that we would be here, this craggy chariot, this home of war. And yet I am not even dangerous enough to make this symbol of discipline and authority raise even one eyebrow. Is there danger lurking inside of me? Can I be a moon? Which one would I be? Could I thrust my head into the plate glass window of the shoe store, only to cut my neck on the lightning bolt jagged edge of glass?  Because the shoes are not the originals. They are all knockoffs. And so am I. I am a dusty imitation of something that's alive. I see the clerk inside the store with his head propped on his arm as he sits and reads the newspaper. The funny papers. The comics. We have comics here on Mars. We circle the sun so much slower than you do on Earth. It doesn't matter how many moons you give us. We’ll never beat you. Earth always wins.

The Memory of Youth

I am the memory of youth. I am the time when we were young and strong and new. When the grass was cut low. When the sun was always welcome. I am the tree that is full, near the home that is freshly painted. I am the refrigerator that is stuffed and ready to fill the air with the comforts of fresh cooking and fresh baking and fresh scrubbing afterwards. I am the bubbles that linger in the lemon fresh air. I am the clean tub that is even cleaner than the brand new baby born up the road at the hospital. I am also the past. I am crumbled. I am sitting here on this lonely trail between one place and another. And now the light flickers and dies each time I open the refrigerator door. You can travel a million miles through space and time and still the scrapings of age flake from the skin of our existence and leave evidence everywhere that we have been here and we have grown old. Even the springs in the bed moan when we wake up. If we wake up. Unfortunately we wake up. No matter where we are. We cannot sterilize ourselves as we age. We get filthy with the years. Each of our moons laughs at us because it has known its own deterioration. We have known collision. We know the one secret of the universe that this all began with a flash of death, and life is just a constant return to it.

Tumors

I am my mother. When did I become my mother? Will I be the widow to my father? When did the colors in my life grow so bored with me that they melted off? When did the outside world and the inside world become the same? When did things that used to grow inside of me stop growing? I am my mother. She is dying yet she is alive in me. When my voice leaves my mouth I hear my mother's. I hear the empty shell of her voice. It stopped having a core. There was nothing in her voice anymore. The only voice she had left was in my head. Her voice leaks out of me. I am my mother. My partner grows tired of me the way my father grew tired of his wife. He developed certain tumors that grew inside of him. They blocked the organs that used to love my mother, and they made it impossible for him to hear her. Or me. When her voice was still filled with laughter. I am not that mother. I am the one who is gone.

The Soft Center

They pass by and they never stare at her. Or they don’t stare long. They pour desire into the air. The air is thick with it. It’s a risk. It smells like the loneliest heart that beats so quick and quiet in the chest they covet. They are not thinking of her heart. They are not thinking of anything in particular but their wants. They think of the skin that shows. They think of the skin that doesn’t. They are men on any planet. It doesn't matter how far you take them. She’s in a cage. She plays with gender. She  gives love to anyone and everyone. She will endure. It’s her soft center. They navigate her. They are unfiltered. They could rip their tongues out. They don't need to speak. They could replace their mouths with each one of their fingers and the muscles in their arms and the whistles in their whispers that dangle and warble between their legs. Bitte beschütze mich vor der Welt. Ich bin so müde.

Welcome Home!

He promised to skim the scum of his city and take the valuable parts to another place. A place he found buried in the post-binary. A place he found in the application of the artificial. The artificial hearts. The artificial limbs. The smiles that he made from nothing but his imagination. And the smiles that have lived everywhere and anywhere and belonged to no one. Because they are not the smiles of anyone in particular and yet they are. They are the real smiles of the real people. But who are these people? And why do they smile? He would say they smile because he makes them. He would say they are filled with angst because that's what he feels, too. And they are welcome here. For he has made a home for them, and they are at home here. This is “the new here.” This is the new art. This is the new world that he creates. There are so many gods here. They all have the power to create. The moons pull the chariot. Their war comes from the smiles that are anonymous and real. They are angry. They wave paper. They shout, "You have stolen our smiles. You have stolen our frowns. You have stolen us." Was the dust stolen to make Adam? Was his rib stolen to make Eve? Do we steal the Earth to make the pigment that makes the colors that make the paintings that make the eyes that wander and weep and turn the smiles into trembling replicas of the truth? Can you steal the truth? Who owns it? Who trains it? Who makes it? And can it be the truth if someone tries to wrap a collar around its neck? Who can judge the owners of the truth? Does the god own it? Or did he steal it from the earth, too?

How Can You?

Am I awake? Am I here? How far have I traveled? Why am I outside? What is the difference? If your home is foreign, how is being outside different from being inside? If the air you breathe is not the air you want to breathe and the bed you sleep on is not the bed you want to sleep on, how can you know if you are inside or out? How can you know when you are awake or asleep? If you walk through the world and you do not feel that it's real, how can you tell whether or not you are dreaming? Or dead?

Cocoon

Why are we quarantined? Why have we been forced to live this way? What have they brought with them, these strangers? These carriers? These incubators? Is the air now contagious for us? Do we dare to walk near the places where they walk? Near the places where they have walked? I do not know. All I know is that my lungs fill and empty as they have my whole life with this dusty air that I never used to notice until I believed it was toxic. And where does the toxins go? What do they do? How do they travel through me? Do they fill me like I'm a puppet? Will I have to burn this dress? My home was once warm and now it is a sauna. A coffin. A cocoon. And will my death be my chrysalis? Will I exit this isolation with golden sunburst wings bigger than the moon?

Turned Down

We have cut and pasted the golden elements of night. We are illuminated. We offer to meet your needs and bend to them. Who smiles who doesn't have to? Where are the smiles on those of us who wander the parking lots or sit in the front seat of the running cars or curl up in the bed in the corner of our trailer homes? Our homes with wheels and wings. With rocket engines that take us so far away. We need to escape. This home of ours has become uninhabitable, and we need to find another. And so we leave behind our smiles and pack ourselves into the ships and take the long journey to another place. To another morbid home. A place where we can be as unhappy there as we are here. And when we are there, we will unpack china and the children's toys and the dresses and the sandals and the diary that we used to keep. But now our diary is used for scrap paper into which we spit our gum. We chewed the gum on the ship to keep her heads clear, but all it did was break our jaws. And now we can't speak. We are dumb. We just stare into the camera with the blank look of people who have been invented by a madman with the growing technology of unconsciousness.