Alice Ju

You skitter mad,



Jack,



misguided ballistic



with a lazy left eye and your high-pitched



whine of a fuselage dripping



coolant immediately crystalline to leave your flicker-



 



trail in the stratosphere. We watch you flicker



by again across our televisions tonight, nomad-



ic the way we could never be boxing up our palace of refrigerated paint-drips.



Here on the couch we commune with you, Jack,



you blockhead, in thinking there is more than adamantine space garbage in the pitch-



black, and going ballistic



 



among the weird, ancient, stars and ballistic



vibrations of the kinds of true science we flick



through at breakfast, in magazines, trying to figure the evolutionary origin of teeth. Pitch



us another perfect white orb, drive us just mad



enough for the American past-time of jack-



hammering detritus and patenting the feeling like the flotsam-feeders we are, dripping



 



with pride like the crackle-pop of your cassette tape voice box which, yet unfinished, drips



school glue at the slightest oscillation. Perhaps, then, it is for the best that the intercontinental ballistic



missiles went unfired, although they were undeniably shaped like lightning bolts, you genius, jack-



booted thug. One flick



of a switch would have made uranium boom towns of all our vacant lots and cataclysmic mad-



houses for our traveling salesmen pitching



 



themselves asunder, who now, door-to-door, sing slightly off-pitch



and only of you. And so drippily



we venerate the one who, barreling upward, kept us safe, like the one who made



glow-in-the-dark, the one who made stars. And so though the ballistic



reports came back conclusive the thought might have flickered



quietly across the Midwest like the seconds before snow that you would come back, Jack.



 



Jack,



our idiot savior, for whom we flock to where cities fall dark as pitch,



where constellations flicker



most conspiratorial. Come morning, we will read the greatest story ever told on cereal boxes, dripping



milk from our chins because *ballistic*



means moving under the force of gravity only. You skitter mad,



 



Jack, throw us a wink. Drip



us another pitch, plans for a new kind of ballistic



to a new shape of moon, and we will flicker to you, madly.